Meet the artist:
Matthew Barney
Saturday, June 7, 2014, 2–3:30pm
Art Gallery of Ontario
317 Dundas Street West
Toronto, Ontario
M5T 1G4
T +1 877 225 4246
www.ago.net
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–Glenn D. Lowry, MoMA
Join visionary artist Matthew Barney in conversation with Luminato Festival Artist Director Jorn Weisbrodt, and Art Gallery of Ontario Curator of Modern & Contemporary Art Kitty Scott on the occasion of the Canadian premiere of River of Fundament at the Elgin Theatre, and the exhibition of works from Barney’s “DRAWING RESTRAINT” series at the AGO.
Buy tickets here.
Matthew Barney’s DRAWING RESTRAINT 2, 6 and 17 from his acclaimed “DRAWING RESTRAINT” series are on view at the AGO now until September 28, organized in conjunction with the Luminato Festival.
Barney is renowned internationally for his provocative and richly visual sequences of sculpture, video and performance. “DRAWING RESTRAINT” (1987–present) is a significant and long-term project for Barney in which he proposes art-making as parallel to athletic training. Begun while still a student at Yale, “DRAWING RESTRAINT” shows the influence of Barney’s background as an athlete and his intent to foreground the physical body and its tensions in a studio practice. The ongoing series “DRAWING RESTRAINT” comprises drawings, sculpture, photographs and video works emerging from his self-imposed and increasingly complex obstacles and scenarios. Considered together, “DRAWING RESTRAINT” forms an ongoing proposition for the harnessing of human impulses and drives into a desired output, artistic or otherwise. It demonstrates the underpinnings of Barney’s work, in which the body plays a central role and ritualistic processes of creation are explored through manifold materials, settings and personas.
The earliest work in the series, DRAWING RESTRAINT 1–6 (1987–89), shows simple studio experiments, where Barney attempts to mark the ceiling and the walls while bouncing on a tilted trampoline or tethered at the thighs with bungee cords. From the 1990s onwards, he began to introduce the spectacular cinematic narratives for which he is best known. DRAWING RESTRAINT 17 (2010), filmed in Switzerland, is a two-channel video bearing Barney’s signature high production value and allegorical storytelling. Usually, in this series, Barney subjects his own body to physical tests; here for the first time, the protagonist is an athletic young Swiss woman, while Barney now plays the removed role of the established artist.
About the artist
Matthew Barney was born in 1967 in San Francisco. Since 1991, his work has been presented worldwide. His most recent project, River of Fundament, is featured in a major new exhibition at Haus der Kunst, Munich, which opened in March. Barney’s many notable solo exhibitions include Prayer Sheet with the Wound and the Nail at Schaulager, Basel (2010); DRAWING RESTRAINT at Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (2008) and Serpentine Gallery, London (2007); and The CREMASTER Cycle at the Solomon R. Guggenheim, New York; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris; and Artangel, London (2002). Barney was the recipient of the Europa 2000 Prize at the 45th Venice Biennale in 1993 and the Hugo Boss Prize in 1996. He lives and works in New York.
*Matthew Barney, DRAWING RESTRAINT 6, 1989/2004. Documentation still. © Matthew Barney. Photo: Chris Winget. Courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels. Jointly owned by Laurenz Foundation, Schaulager, Basel; and The Museum Of Modern Art, New York, Richard S. Zeisler Bequest and The Blanchette Hooker Rockefeller Fund.
