San Francisco, CA - The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) hosts the exhibition Matthew Barney: DRAWING RESTRAINT through September 17, 2006.  SFMOMA will be the sole U.S. venue for this major traveling survey, the first to gather all of Barney’s work to date made under the title DRAWING RESTRAINT.  The exhibition charts the trajectory of this ongoing performance-based project—currently featuring 14 sequentially numbered installments—which spans work from 1987 to the present. The ninth installment, DRAWING RESTRAINT 9 (2005) will occupy the majority of the exhibition space, and includes Barney’s newest feature-length film of the same title and the complete collection of related drawings, photographs, and large-scale sculptures.  Bringing together more than 150 objects in a wide range of media, the site-specific installation, designed by the artist, provides new research into this complex and visually alluring body of work.

At SFMOMA, Matthew Barney : DRAWING RESTRAINT will take up an entire floor, which, for the first time, will be almost completely free of walls; the galleries will become an open-plan environment that creates a nonchronological flow between objects and invites the viewer to enter at any point and explore as if walking through a landscape.  The works in the exhibition will include videos, sculptures, drawings, performance remnants, and photographs.  The film component of DRAWING RESTRAINT 9 (145 min.), featuring a screen appearance and soundtrack by musician Björk, will be shown daily.

Matthew Barney: DRAWING RESTRAINT originated at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan, and was co-organized by Yuko Hasegawa, artistic director at the Kanazawa, and Soyeon Ahn, chief curator at Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul, Korea.  The U.S. presentation is overseen by Benjamin Weil, adjunct curator of media arts, SFMOMA.

Weil states, “In light of our long history with Barney’s work—SFMOMA was the first museum to give Barney a solo exhibition in 1991—the honor of presenting the DRAWING RESTRAINT survey has particular resonance, reinforcing an ongoing institutional commitment to his art. Focusing on a specific body of work and its evolution over the course of Barney’s entire career, the exhibition sheds new light on his relationship to performance, as well as to his interest in rituals and constraints—something that reaches a climax in his latest installment, DRAWING RESTRAINT 9.”

Barney’s entire artistic practice investigates the development of form, and DRAWING RESTRAINT is based on the notion that form emerges only through struggle against resistance.  Rooted in the history of endurance performance, the idea grew out of the artist’s early experience as an athlete and his thinking about resistance as a catalyst for muscle growth.  By extension, he wondered how this bulking of tissue, known as hypertrophy, might make a case for self-imposed resistance as an impetus for creativity.  The work proposes the body as an analogy for creative process and a model for the artist’s conception of a productive state based on unresolved tensions between desire, stored potential, and repression.

SFMOMA was the first museum to acquire Barney’s work, including his first major installation, TRANSEXUALIS, 1991.  The Museum’s collection also includes FIELD DRESSING (Orifill): Manual A, 1989; REPRESSIA, 1991; DELAY OF GAME (Manual) B, 1991; and CREMASTER 2: The Drones’ Exposition, 1999, which had its West Coast premiere at SFMOMA.

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