MATTHEW BARNEY

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 awatchful eye, while carving a relief portrait of her into a wooden mould with a rotary tool. The daughterexplores the studio at first as a foreign place, then gradually learns its contours, occasionally pausing toperform improvised movements. She creates makeshift charcoal by burning the ends of tree-limbs inthe heat of the furnace, and then uses these singed sticks to burn drawing marks into sheets of paperthat hang on the walls. While father attempts to capture a likeness, daughter uses gesture and processto record her movement around the studio indexically, like marking rotations around the sun. Their duetculminates in a dramatic metal pour, as the crew pours molten brass into Barney’s relief drawing. Themetal 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 womenthrough the Idaho wilderness, surveilling them and making drawings of their activities. This narrativewas, for Barney, an examination of whether and how artists possess their subjects in the act of renderingthem. These notions of possessiveness, watchfulness, and power dynamics between artist and subjectare 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 sharplygeometric planes of light and colour. In another, orange flames make a dense field of colour on a yellowground, while a figure rendered in charcoal seems to create a strata of marks from within the drawingitself.

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 drawagainst these limitations. As the series developed, Barney expanded the notion of restraint toencompass narrative or psychological restraints – notably with the production of DRAWINGRESTRAINT 7 with its satyr characters and sets in New York; DRAWING RESTRAINT 9, filmedaboard a whaling ship in Japan; and DRAWING RESTRAINT 17, featuring Barney and a competitiveclimber and filmed at the Schaulager, Basel. Over the last two decades, Barney has continued to usethe rubric of DRAWING RESTRAINT to explore both physical and psychological restraint, and often tobring narrative elements into a phenomenological mode of art making. Barney has made a number ofexhibitions focused on this series at major institutions internationally: 21st Century Museum ofContemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan; Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul, Korea; San FranciscoMuseum of Modern Art, CA; Serpentine Gallery, London, UK; and Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, Austria. In2010, Schaulager presented Matthew Barney: Prayer Sheet with the Wound and the Nail, anexpansive exhibition dedicated to DRAWING RESTRAINT. That same year, an archive of DrawingRestraint videos and sculptures were acquired jointly by the Museum of Modern Art, New York andLaurenz Foundation, Schaulager, Basel.