For the first time in China an important exhibition dedicated to Matthew Barney

Many times we talked about the growing Chinese contemporary art scene. By becoming an obligatory destination for intellectuals and creative people, Beijing it's adding another important milestone with the presentation at new UCCA (Center for contemporary art) of Matthew Barney exhibition: “Matthew Barney: Redoubt”.

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Curated by Pamela Frank and open until January 12, 2020, this exhibition born in 2016 when Barney was in Beijing for a series of conferences held at the Central Academy of Fine Arts. To moderated this major round table, that saw the participation, among others, of important Chinese artists such as Cao Fei, Wang Jianwei and Qiu Zhijie, was the UCCA director Philip Tinari.

As announced by the director, hosting one of the most important artists of the twentieth century means a lot to the Chinese art scene that, after the 2000s, looked to Barney as a pioneering point of reference for content, materials and experiments. As the first occasion for the Chinese public to see a massive corpus of works created by Barney between 2016-2019, the director also declared: "Working with Matthew Barney has always been a dream for UCCA and I'm very proud of it". 

The exhibition includes an eponymous two-hour film that traces the story of a wolf hunt in Idaho’s Sawtooth Mountain range, intertwining the theme of the hunt with those of mythology and artistic creation. In Barney's metaphorical universe this film, which develops in a series of six hunting trips, recalls the myth of Diana and Actaeon. In addition to the video to complement the artistic experience, there are five monumental sculptures made with trunks from a burned forest in Idaho and about fifty engravings used during the filming of Redoubt. The engravings are those made by Matthew Barney himself, who appears in the film as Engraver, an artist who stealthily chases hunting scenes to document them on copper. These plates that during the film are transformed thanks to an electro-plating process, bear witness the continuous interdisciplinary and multi-material research of Barney, who has always been an extremely versatile artist.

Credit image: Matthew Barney: Redoubt, Installation view at UCCA. Courtesy UCCA

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