Matthew Barney will be joined by LACMA CEO and Wallis Annenberg Director Michael Govan for a conversation following a screening of excerpted video works by the artist. The programme bridges Barney's career, including excerpts from his earliest OTTO trilogy works, first exhibited at Regen Projects, Los Angeles in 1991, and now on view at LACMA with Matthew Barney: REPRESSIA (decline), until 7 January 2024.

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Matthew Barney’s Cremaster 5 is included in Technocool. New Trends in Hungarian Art in the Nineties (1989–2001). The exhibition explores the ways in which the revolutionising spirit of electronic music, DJ culture, and the new visuality of parties served as key inspiration for a generation of artists who started their career in the 1990s. Alongside Hungarian artists, Technocool also presents work by foreign artists who exerted a major influence in Hungary in this period. The displayed works showcase the development of different media – paintings, readymades, photographs, prints, videos and, to a lesser extent, computer-based art – as a new opportunity for self-expression during the nineties. 

Hungarian National Gallery

Three works from Matthew Barney’s Drawing Restraint 9, 2005, will be on view in Au bout de mes rêves. Showcased over the three floors of the Tripostal, Lille, the exhibition brings together works from the Vanhaerents Art Collection, one of Belgium’s most significant private collections of contemporary art.

Vanhaerents Art Collection

On view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) from 23 July, Matthew Barney’s REPRESSIA (decline) is a seminal installation from his breakout solo exhibition Facility of DECLINE at Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York, in 1991. The room-sized sculptural installation features two videos in which Barney performs strenuous acts of athletics with unorthodox outcomes: Radial Drill, 1991, and Blind Perineum, 1991. The central space features sculptural components that draw from the exercise equipment and materials used in wrestling, some of which are fashioned out of transmutable elements such as cast petroleum wax and petroleum jelly. Recently acquired by LACMA, REPRESSIA (decline) established Barney’s visual language and anticipates the corporeal drive of his Cremaster cycle of five films, all of which feature performance across different sites and timelines.

Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)

Works by Matthew Barney, Ida Eklbad, Albert Oehlen, and Christopher Wool are included in Before Tomorrow – an extensive group exhibition celebrating the hidden treasures and recent acquisitions of the Astrup Fearnley Collection in celebration of its thirtieth anniversary. The selected works represent various time periods and highlight a number of key directions that have come to define the identity of the collection and the museum more broadly.

Astrup Fearnley Museet

Metrograph is proud to announce ‘Matthew Barney: The Cremaster Cycle and Select Early Works’, bringing Barney's iconic Cremaster Cycle back to New York over the course of four evenings and a special one-night engagement of re-mastered early works. The first screening in the series will take place on Wednesday, 17 May with Cremaster 4 and Cremaster 1. 

Of The Cremaster Cycle, Matthew Barney’s nine-year cinematic undertaking that would help cement his place as one of the premier art world figures to emerge in the 1990s, the artist would state that he “was trying to take on a cinematic language that I had not dealt with before… to see how this sculptural project could align itself with the cinematic form.” Named for the muscle responsible for raising and lowering the testicles in response to temperature, each of the Cremaster films is an allegory-rich, visually stunning, and sprawling investigation into questions involving sexual development and the act of creation, a towering achievement that we’re screening on the occasion of the appearance of Barney’s new installation, Secondary, with the artist himself joining us in the theater with writer Maggie Nelson.

“The Cremaster Cycle had its debut in New York and has not been screened in the city since 2015. I’m delighted to bring it to Metrograph this spring in tandem with the premiere of my new film work Secondary – on public view in my Long Island City studio concurrently, from May 12 – June 25, 2023.”
 – Matthew Barney

Cremaster 4 and Cremaster 1 will screen as a double bill on Wednesday, May 17 at 7:00 pm. Cremaster 5 will screen on Tuesday, May 23 at 7:00, with subsequent Cremaster screenings to be announced.

Matthew Barney and Maggie Nelson will be in conversation at Metrograph on Sunday, June 4 following a screening of Barney's early works.

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Matthew Barney’s latest five-channel video installation, Secondary, will be on view to the public from 12 May 2023 in the artist’s first public exhibition staged at his Long Island studio. The installation maps two different narratives onto each other, using movement as the formal through-line. The first revolves around the violence and spectacle inherent in American football and American culture, while the parallel narrative is a material-based choreography where the substances Barney uses to make his sculptures – including lead, aluminium, terracotta, and plastic – are generated, formed and manipulated by performers. Involving a cast of professional dancers, actors and musicians, the ensemble piece will be lent a spatial dimension by its staging in Barney’s studio on the bank of the East River, which serves both as the site and as a central character in Secondary’s narrative structure.

Hours:
Wednesday – Friday, 12 pm – 8 pm
Saturday – Sunday, 11 am – 4 pm

SECONDARY
Watch the trailer here

Matthew Barney
SECONDARY, 2023
Five-channel 4K colour video installation with 12 channel immersive sound, three-sided central video display, artificial turf field, artist-designed stadium lights
Shot in 8K. Aspect ratio: 1.77
Running time: 60 minutes Edition of 1 + 1AP

Bayhorse, 2018, by Matthew Barney, will be included in the group exhibition Prima Materia: The Periodic Table in Contemporary Art. Linking individual works of art with an element from the periodic table which each work incorporates, the exhibition encourages audiences to consider how artists use material as a basis for sociological, emotional, political, and even spiritual subject matter. Bayhorse, a series of four copper electroplates onto which Barney engraved a landscape, invite a tactile engagement. From these rounded and raised surfaces, the landscape grows outward and becomes increasingly prominent.

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum