October Matthew Barney Exhibitions / Screenings

California State University Long Beach will screen all five movies in the Cremaster Cycle next month, in conjunction with their exhibition of Matthew Barney's special effects collaborator Gabe Bartolos: Abhorrence and Obsession  (running through December 8). The screenings will be held on three consecutive Saturdays, October 5, 12, and 19. Ticket info and the full schedule are here.

Also next month, Matthew Barney's drawing exhibition The Subliming Vessel (aka La Chambre de Sublimation) will open at the Bibliotheque National de France in Paris on October 8. A version of the exhibition was previously on view at the Morgan Library in New York, but the French installation will include materials drawn from the BnF's collection that were not shown in New York. The exhibition includes approximately 80 drawings, created between 1988 and 2011 and related to projects from the Cremaster Cycle through the currently in-process River of Fundament. Barney will also create a new work in the Drawing Restraint series at the BnF, in a performance that will be filmed for future use. The exhibition runs through January 5.

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