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In his third exhibition at Sadie Coles HQ, Matthew Barney presents a series of new sculptures. They have their origins in his 2014 film River of Fundament, a six-hour tour de force which premiered at the English National Opera this summer to wide acclaim. Each work condenses the film’s dominant themes– death, rebirth, and the twilight era of modern America– into totemic sculptural form, while invoking the complex personal iconography that Barney has developed over his twenty-year career.
Barney’s sculptures translate motifs from River of Fundament into autonomous works of art, bearing witness to these set – piece performances while recasting their themes of decay, regeneration and alchemical metamorphosis. Crown Victoria is a zinc cast of the third vehicle’s undercarriage, th e prototype for which was created in an elaborate hieratic ceremony, BA (performed in New York in 2013). Sprawling and skeletal, it emanates the melancholic grandeur of an abandoned ruin or sarcophagus. Loops of corrugated tubing, arrayed like ribs along the chassis, evoke mummified remains; a large coiling pump speaks simultaneously of biological systems and insensate machinery. Marooned on blocks, the object stands both as a decimated vehicle and a body undergoing reincarnation: deposits of salt crystals at the two ‘poles’ of the sculpture seemingly presage a new transmutation.
via sadiecoles.com