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until 06.11. | #3164ARTatBerlin | Galerie Max Hetzler presents from 14th September 2021 the solo exhibition “After Ruby Ridge” with new works by the artist Matthew Barney in the Galerie Bleibtreustraße 15/16.
The exhibition presents over 20 new drawings and 2 sculptures and is part of a series of projects that relate to Barney’s 2018 feature-length film Redoubt. All of the works draw on the visual language of the film, which is set in the remote Sawtooth Mountains of Idaho and explores such wide-ranging themes as cosmology, American frontier myths and the role of artistic production. The exhibition is named after Ruby Ridge, the site of a deadly confrontation between a separatist’s family and American Federal Police, an incident that caused a stir in North Idaho in the 1990s. The title transforms Barney’s statement that Redoubt is a portrait of a place, in all its complexity, its beauty and its ugliness.
Barney works in clear series developed over several years, creating works that combine sculptural installations with performance, video, sculpture, printmaking and drawing. Drawing plays a major role in his oeuvre, with the medium functioning both preparatory, in the form of sketches in the planning phase of a film or exhibition project, and as a supporting pillar of his artistic expressiveness, which has been of great importance from the beginning of his career until today.
The drawings shown combine pencil and gouache on coloured paper in polyethylene frames made by the artist. Their colour palette refers to the forest fires and the colours of the sky in the region in Idaho where Redoubt was flamed. They are about encounters between figures and landscapes, as well as the technical equipment used to survey the landscape. Barney depicts extreme landscapes in violent contrasts between nature and technology, often showing a marked formal incongruity. Among the works on paper is a series of pencil drawings on pale pink paper named the Metamorphoses drawings after Ovid’s mythical tales. Ovid’s themes often accompany a violent transformation in an idyllic landscape. An explicitly erotic component runs through these works, which, with the motif of the artist-as-voyeur, brings Barney’s interest in the central question of whether and how an artist possesses his subject into focus.
Matthew Barney, Lodgepole Stand, (Detail), 2021 © Matthew Barney
Alongside the drawings, two new sculptures are presented, titled Boreand Bole. Bore, 2021 is a monumental sculpture modelled and cast after the shape of a burnt tree felled after a forest fire in Idaho. It is made of brass and copper – materials that recur in Barney’s Redoubt cycle – and combined with polycaprolactone (thermoplastic), which is used throughout the artist’s work. Here the copper and brass have been cast to fit together like an intricate jigsaw puzzle with the polycaprolactone trunk and bases. A spiral groove that winds around the sculpture is reminiscent of both the sinuous pattern of the tree and the thread in the barrel of a gun. A barrel cleaner protrudes from the opening of the tree and winds its way through the inside of the rifle form. This object, usually used to clean a rifle barrel, here takes on the appearance of a guest, threading the story through the host in the form of the tree.
Bole, 2021 is the first sculpture in Barney’s oeuvre to be made entirely of wood. It is made from the original trunk of the tree felled in Idaho. The trauma of the burnt forest is evident in the scarred surface of the tree, where carved out wounds and wooden feet along the trunk evoke associations with medieval religious wooden sculptures. This work combines traditional carving with digital editing techniques, creating an elective affinity between the tactical design of a precision rifle and the baroque expressiveness of a statue of a saint.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a screening of the film Redoubt at the flmkunst66 cinema at Bleibtreustraße 12, directly adjacent to the gallery.
Matthew Barney (*1967, San Francisco), lives and works in New York. Solo exhibitions of his work have been held at international institutions including, among others, Hayward Gallery, London (2021); UCCA, Beijing and Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven (both 2019); Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo (2016); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2015); Haus der Kunst, Munich; The Museum of Old and New Art, Tasmania, Australia and Art Gallery of Ontario, Ontario (all 2014); Fondazione Merz, Turin and Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (both 2008); Serpentine Gallery, London (2007) and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2003).
Barney has received numerous awards, including the Aperto Prize at the 1993 Venice Biennale, the Hugo Boss Award in 1996, the Kaiser- Ring Prize in 2007 in Goslar, Germany, and the Persistence of Vision Award at the 2011 San Francisco International Film Festival. Matthew Barney’s works are in the collections of major international museums, including the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo; the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris; the Ludwig Museum, Cologne and the Tate, London.
Further exhibitions and events:
2nd September – 11th December 2021
Raphaela Simon
Bleibtreustraße 15/16, 10623 Berlin
7th September – 11th December 2021
Rebecca Warren
Window Gallery, Goethestraße 2/3, 10623 Berlin
8th September – 11th December 2021
Rudolf Stingel
Beauty Salon Omm
Kantstraße 139, 10623 Berlin
17th September – 30th October 2021
Julian Schnabel
Goethestrasse 2/3, 10623 Berlin
Exhibition Matthew Barney – Galerie Max Hetzler | Contemporary Art – Zeitgenössische Kunst in Berlin – Exhibitions Berlin Galleries – ART at Berlin
