Gladstone is pleased to present its first exhibition with Matthew Barney in Seoul, which debuts the most recent work in his career-spanning DRAWING RESTRAINT series. DRAWING RESTRAINT 25, a 28-minute silent video, was shot with a small crew in Barney's studio in January 2021. The performance is a duet of sorts, in which Barney and his daughter Isadora each engage in ritualised drawing using the tools of the studio. The video will be exhibited with a sculptural vitrine containing elements related to the DRAWING RESTRAINT performance. Also on view are a series of drawings on coloured paper that layer themes from DRAWING RESTRAINT 25 with imagery from Barney's last feature-length film Redoubt.
DRAWING RESTRAINT 25 takes place in the artist's New York studio, with a small foundry as a mise en scene. As Barney's daughter begins to circle the foundry perimeter, he tracks her movement with a watchful eye, while carving a relief portrait of her into a wooden mould with a rotary tool. The daughter explores the studio at first as a foreign place, then gradually learns its contours, occasionally pausing to perform improvised movements. She creates makeshift charcoal by burning the ends of tree-limbs in the heat of the furnace, and then uses these singed sticks to burn drawing marks into sheets of paper that hang on the walls. While father attempts to capture a likeness, daughter uses gesture and process to record her movement around the studio indexically, like marking rotations around the sun. Their duet culminates in a dramatic metal pour, as the crew pours molten brass into Barney's relief drawing. The metal flows into the lines of the portrait, first filling the lines and then burning out the wood around them, erasing the image and suffusing the foundry with the orange light of the flames.
In a group of drawings linking DR25 to Redoubt, Barney layers finely-wrought graphite rendering with brightly coloured gouache and gestural charcoal. In Redoubt, Barney's character pursued a trio of women through the Idaho wilderness, surveilling them and making drawings of their activities. This narrative was, for Barney, an examination of whether and how artists possess their subjects in the act of rendering them. These notions of possessiveness, watchfulness, and power dynamics between artist and subject are mapped onto the father/daughter narrative of DRAWING RESTRAINT 25. In one such drawing, Barney's Engraver character stands in the wilderness, with the beam from his headlamp creating sharply geometric planes of light and colour. In another, orange flames make a dense field of colour on a yellow ground, while a figure rendered in charcoal seems to create a strata of marks from within the drawing itself.
Barney's DRAWING RESTRAINT videos began as documentations of task-based works carried out in his studio: he fashioned physical restraints like harnesses, ramps, or weights, and attempted to draw against these limitations. As the series developed, Barney expanded the notion of restraint to encompass narrative or psychological restraints – notably with the production of DRAWING RESTRAINT 7 with its satyr characters and sets in New York; DRAWING RESTRAINT 9, filmed aboard a whaling ship in Japan; and DRAWING RESTRAINT 17, featuring Barney and a competitive climber and filmed at the Schaulager, Basel. Over the last two decades, Barney has continued to use the rubric of DRAWING RESTRAINT to explore both physical and psychological restraint, and often to bring narrative elements into a phenomenological mode of art making. Barney has made a number of exhibitions focused on this series at major institutions internationally: 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan; Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul, Korea; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; Serpentine Gallery, London, UK; and Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, Austria. In 2010, Schaulager presented Matthew Barney: Prayer Sheet with the Wound and the Nail, an expansive exhibition dedicated to DRAWING RESTRAINT. That same year, an archive of Drawing Restraint videos and sculptures were acquired jointly by the Museum of Modern Art, New York and Laurenz Foundation, Schaulager, Basel.
Press release courtesy Gladstone Gallery.
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