Saturday, February 11, 2012

Matthew Barney / Barry X Ball Dual-Dual Portrait in France



Artist Barry X Ball (who showed an earlier portrait of Barney in Cremaster Fanatic's Matthew Barney Show) will be exhibiting a "dual-dual" portrait of himself and Matthew Barney at Galerie Nathalie Obadia in Paris. The work consists of two busts (one carved from italian portoro marble, the other from portuguese gold marble) impaled on toothpick-shaped metal rods and suspended from the ceiling.

The artist writes, "The composite figures richly embossed, in a manner reminiscent of late-renaissance milanese parade armor, with a cornucopia of silhouetted motifs: abrahamic ecclesiastical symbols, animals, decorative flourishes, and protuberant, warty, half-spheres... differing surface treatments keyed to the corresponding swag-draped corporeal flay strata: a glistening sheen for the splayed entrails, miniature horizontal flutes for the mid-level viscera, and gnarled, ridged, sfumato-esque soft-focus ornamental relief for the epidermis, with eyes, oral features, and the mutilated face gleaming, respectively, with a moist, lachrymal / salivary / mucosal polish, with mannered, attenuated, crown-like cranium-top shatter-burst exit-wounds."

The exhibition will be on view at Galerie Nathalie Obadia from March 17th to May 16th. More photos of the work can be seen at designboom.com