Presented at the 14th edition of Lo schermo dell'arte, 2021

 

Matthew Barney’s latest film Redoubt follows six characters through a series of mysterious confrontations in the wild landscape of the Sawtooth Mountains of central Idaho. The film is a free adaptation of the myth of Diana, the goddess of hunting and nature, and Actaeon, a hunter who violates her intimacy and is punished for it. The landscape, both as a setting and as a subject, has long been at the center of the artist’s work: here, classic, cosmological and American myths confront each other on man’s role in the natural world. The protagonists, in an attempt to establish their place in the wild, communicate without dialogue, through gestures and choreographies. The title derives from the name of the separatist movement American Redoubt, widespread in the region where the film was shot, intended as a reference to isolation and wilderness.

 

Matthew Barney

San Francisco 1967, lives and works in New York. He has held numerous internationally, among which: Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain, Paris; Fondazione Merz, Turin; Haus der Kunst, Munich; Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Serpentine Gallery, London; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; UCCA / Ullens, Beijing.

 

Selected Filmography

2014 River of Fundament; 2007 De Lama Lamina; 2005 Drawing Restraint 9; 1994–2002 The Cremaster Cycle