Arguably the most celebrated artist of his generation, Matthew Barney made his debut in 1991 to much acclaim. Since then, with his seemingly infinite imagination and spirit of experimentation, Barney has continued to expand the perimeter of the art of our time. Questioning the limits of the physical body and the differentiation between male and female sexes, Barney¡¯s work surpasses conventional ways of thinking around widely discoursed contemporary issues, such as the body, gender, and identity. Informed by the artist¡¯s broad-ranging knowledge in medicine, athletic training, physics, psychology, and mythology as well as by his personal experiences, Barney¡¯s work unfolds from his own body, the point of its departure, to present a unique and unprecedented cosmology.

In Barney¡¯s artistic universe, bodily condition is symbolized by the Field Emblem, combining a pill shape intersected by a horizontal bar. It denotes a body with restraint, or the state of an undifferentiated during the fetus development. Giventhe fact that male and female sexes remain in the state of non-division for six weeks following fertilization, Barney proposed as the central premise for his narrative that sexual energy, which could either ¡°ascend¡± into the female or ¡°descend¡± into the male, could also exercise infinite creative power. The celebrated five-part epic CREMASTERCycle (1994-2002) was created based on this premise.

The present exhibition consists of the complete series of Barney¡¯s DRAWING RESTRAINT, begun in 1987 when the artist was just transitioning from being an athlete to an artistic career. The works in the series are inspired by the condition of hypertropyhy, where the muscles of the body develop strength and size when placed under resistance, and turns it into artistic production that explores ¡°restraint as a source of creativity.

¡± The new DRAWING RESTRAINT 9 expresses the condition in which the horizontal bar of the emblem, the symbol of restraint, is temporarily removed?or, the state after the clear differentiation of male and female sexes?and takes the form of a 145 minutes long feature film, large-scale sculptures, and a series of photographs. Furthermore, it gives form to the concepts of disintegration of objects and processes of new creation, which necessarily take place after a removal of restraint. In this light, the work is the result of a deep reflection upon the essence of nature as simultaneous creator and destroyer.