February 26–May 1, 2016
Adam Art Gallery
Victoria University of Wellington
Gate 3, Kelburn Parade PO Box 600
Wellington
New Zealand 6140
Hours: Tuesday–Sunday 11am–5pm
Adam Art Gallery is pleased to present Matthew Barney: DRAWING RESTRAINT, the first solo presentation by this renowned American artist in New Zealand.
Initiated in 1987, DRAWING RESTRAINT is an ongoing series of site-specific, performative drawings undertaken in private and documented on video. In these, Barney deploys a range of mark-making exercises, including climbing walls, lifting and dragging weights, and springing from a trampoline to extend the reach of his drawing tools. And as the series unfolds, increasingly he introduces props and other participants to establish links to his films, live events and large-scale sculptures and installations.
Conceived in conversation with the artist, this exhibition selectively surveys the series, bringing together 12 as a concise installation of ceiling-mounted monitors that condition how the viewer physically engages with the works in the space. These span early works produced at the Yale University School of Art in 1988 through to his most recent drawing, where eight women from the Legends Football League drag a wooden sled loaded with a massive block of graphite around the walls of the LA Museum of Contemporary Art prior to the opening of the River of Fundament exhibition last September.
In the artist’s words, this series functions as an “interval” or test space where Barney treats an expanded notion of drawing as a physical and conceptual tool to extend and connect the complex thematics of his practice. Three decades on, this project resists closure, remaining one of the most distinctive contributions Barney has made to the history of contemporary art.
The DRAWING RESTRAINT works have been jointly loaned from the Laurenz Foundation, Schaulager, Basel and The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The Adam Art Gallery acknowledges the generous support of Matthew Barney Studio and Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York.
The exhibition has been conceived to accompany the one-night screening of Matthew Barney and Jonathan Bepler’s most recent film, the six-hour epic River of Fundament (2006–14). This presented on Saturday, March 19 at the historic Embassy Theatre in downtown Wellington, as the Gallery’s contribution to the 2016 New Zealand Festival.
Matthew Barney: DRAWING RESTRAINT is staged alongside Linie Line Linea—Contemporary Drawing, an exhibition of drawings by 20 contemporary artists living and working in Berlin, brought to the Adam by the Institute for Cultural Relations (ifa) and Goethe-Institut Wellington.
For further information visit the gallery’s website
Adam Art Gallery
The Adam Art Gallery is the university art gallery of Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand. It is a forum for critical thinking about art and its histories as well as the professional structure within which the Victoria University Art Collection is managed. The gallery’s programmes explore the full range of media available to artists and aim to test and expand art form and disciplinary boundaries. The gallery is a remarkable architectural statement designed by the late Sir Ian Athfield, one of New Zealand’s foremost architects.
