Artists

Matthew Barney

Press release

Sadie Coles HQ, Gladstone Gallery, Regen Projects and Galerie Max Hetzler are pleased to announce SECONDARY, an exhibition in four parts by Matthew Barney. Unfolding sequentially across the galleries, each presentation traces the artist’s career-long interest in the relationship between the body, transmogrification, physical possibility and the deep-rooted history of violence that serves as a cornerstone to the American psyche. In addition to a new series of sculptures and drawings, Barney will premier his film, SECONDARY, in London, Paris and Los Angeles. Across the installations, Barney re-maps subject matter that has repeatedly circulated within his oeuvre, conflating notions of material potential and mythmaking with the spectre of entropic collapse.

Each arm of the exhibition traces back to the artist’s 2023 film, SECONDARY, a five-channel work that draws its inspiration from the infamous 1978 Raiders vs. Patriots game in which defensive back Jack Tatum delivered an open field hit that left wide receiver Darryl Stingley permanently paralysed. Recalling his own memories of the play, the impact, and the culture of spectacle that continues to inform the incident today, Barney addresses the consequences of a sport that has become synonymous with physical brutality. Moving from pregame to game, from play to impact, and finally arriving at the media’s relentless repetition of the collision itself, the exhibitions examine the connective tissue that joins our scopophilic desire to witness lethal force with the anxieties stirred by the vulnerabilities of our own bodies.