Sadie Coles HQ is pleased to announce their first exhibition with acclaimed artist Matthew Barney. Since the early nineties his work has spanned all media - film, sculpture, photography, drawing, and performance – in order to capture the meticulous vision of his masterworks. This exhibition, his first commercial show in London, will consist of three sculptures and a photograph related to his recent project DRAWING RESTRAINT 9.
DRAWING RESTRAINT 9 is the most complex installment in an ongoing series is to explore “resistance as a pre-requisite for development and a vehicle for creativity.” The feature film DRAWING RESTRAINT 9 features Barney and musician Björk, who also scored the film, as Occidental Guests aboard a whaling vessel in the Sea of Japan who’s seemingly predestined meeting results in an unconventional romance. Throughout the work, Barney addresses various themes surrounding the history and culture of Japan including the Shinto religion, the tea ceremony, the history of whaling, and the sub-plantation of blubber with refined petroleum for oil.
The three sculptures featured in this exhibition are each a portrait of the film’s main protagonists: the male and female characters and the whaling ship, whose subsequent transformations power the film’s action. Barney creates sculptures recalling the architecture of the vessel and the physical transformations that take place, reflecting on the relationship between the Japanese Hosts and the titular Occidental Guests.
Matthew Barney was born in 1967 and studied art at Yale University. He has received numerous awards including the Aperto prize at the 1993 Venice Biennale and the 1996 Hugo Boss Award. He has been included in group exhibitions worldwide such as Documenta IX in Kassel, Germany; the Whitney Biennials of 1993 and 1995; and the groundbreaking “PostHuman” exhibition in 1992. His solo exhibition “The Cremaster Cycle,” organized by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, traveled to the Museum Ludwig, Cologne, and the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. The large-scale exhibition of the entire “Drawing Restraint” series toured to San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the 21st Century Museum of Modern Art in Kanazawa, Japan, and the Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul, Korea, in 2005.
For further information please contact the gallery at +44 (0)20 7493 8611 or press@sadiecoles.com