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.

Purchase tickets here

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

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

This exhibition will focus on the theme of the film Drawing Restraint 9 (2005) by Matthew Barney, who has developed the theme of Japanese culture as represented by the practices of whaling and the tea ceremony using a variety of media including film, sculpture, installation, and photography. Taking the whaling mother ship Nisshin Maru, which appears in the film as both a place and a character, the exhibition will feature Drawing Restraint 9: Cabinet of Nisshin Maru, a work in Barney’s character vitrine series, alongside six photographic works.

21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa