Matthew Barney: The Early Years

Gallerist Althea Viafora-Kress recently sent us a link to this wonderful web page documenting Barney's work in two group shows held at her gallery in 1990. Barney had just graduated from Yale and was recommended to the gallery by David von Schlegal, the head of Yale’s MFA sculpture department. The gallery's web site has some very interesting documentation of these shows -- here are a few choice items (you may need to click through the image links to view at full size if you want to read them):



First is the original consignment form for Drawing Restraint II (documents) in the Group Drawing Exhibition. You could have bought Barney's piece for only $2,000!!!



Here is Roberta Smith's New York Times review of the exhibtion -- probably the first published review of Barney's work.



These are notes taken by gallery staff on the day Barney installed Field Dressing (orifill): Docu/fragments in his second exhibition at the gallery in 1990. Below are two pages of notes on hypertrophy given to the gallery by Barney before the exhibition of Drawing Restraint II