Sadie Coles HQ, Gladstone Gallery, Regen Projects, and Galerie Max Hetzler present SECONDARY, a four-part show by Matthew Barney. At the crossroads of video, ballet and sports performance, the enveloping installation transfix audiences.

Each exhibition follows the artist’s long-term fascination with the relationship between vulnerability, the body, damage, and the deeply ingrained history of violence that forms the basis of the American psyche as it unfolds sequentially throughout the galleries. An exhibition of Barney’s work is also staged at Fondation Cartier in Paris.

Barney premiered his film, SECONDARY, in London, Paris, and Los Angeles, along with a new set of paintings and sculptures. The artist remaps recurrent themes across his body of work in each installation, mixing the spectre of entropic collapse with ideas of material potential and myth making. Every segment of the display may be traced back to the artist’s five-channel 2023 film SECONDARY. Barney discusses the effects of a sport that has grown to be associated with physical violence while reliving his personal memories of the play, its impact, and the spectacle culture that surrounds the tragedy even now.

It’s a major event for the artist who have never ceased to create since he came to the spotlight with CREMASTER Cycle and his presentation at the Venice Biennale in 1993 and 1996.

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Image: Matthew Barney, SECONDARY (Production Still), 2023. Photography by Jonathan O’Sullivan. All images courtesy of the artist and Fondation Cartier.