There is no gallery show this year with a more eyebrow-raising title than “The Bitch,” and it would be hard to think of a more singular setting for a duo presentation of art by Matthew Barney and Alex Katz than the decrepit and at least a little bit creepy former restaurant space that currently plays home to O’Flaherty’s in New York.
Followers of the enigmatic gallery founded by the painter Jamian Juliano-Villani have been treated to a wild assortment of exhibitions over the past three years, from shows of sculptures of psycho toddlers to performers rubbing themselves with Vaseline, and “The Bitch”—on view through December 19 and very likely never to be duplicated again—is another one for the annals.
At the entryway is a centerpiece of a sort: a video for which Barney, continuing his long-running series of “Drawing Restraint” works, filmed the 97-year-old Katz climbing up and down a ladder to make a painting. Katz is more agile than might be expected, and the mix of his movements with the contemplativeness of his gaze is transfixing over the course of close to an hour. Also confounding—especially given the three-screen display split between TVs hanging from the ceiling in an arrangement that evokes a sort of ghostly sports bar.
“I wanted to approach it like an athletic event and focus on Alex’s movement and his physicality, particularly his moves up and down the ladder,” Barney said in an interview at O’Flaherty’s last week. “He has a rigorous and consistent exercise regime. As I understand the way his painting works into his day, it’s a very physical thing for him. It’s a physical practice, and he trains for his physical practice. It’s one of the reasons why it felt like a ‘Drawing Restraint’ could be made with Alex as the subject.”
Amplifying the sporting atmosphere are brief interludes during which the screens turn to squint-inducing flashes of orange and blue soundtracked by moody disruptions of electronic sound. “We were thinking about those as commercial breaks in the context of a sports broadcast, how you’re in one situation and then you’re suddenly thrown aggressively into another,” Barney said. “It’s loud and has a different energy to what you’ve been seeing.”
Sound design figures subtly but significantly in the work, titled DRAWING RESTRAINT 28 (2024). Much of it transpires more or less as normal, with brush strokes and room tones and creaks from the ladder sounding as they otherwise would. But certain passages play with scale and sync so that aural events go out of phase, rise in volume to skew as more prominent, and transform into something closer to psychedelic, synesthetic events. The sonic signals, created via Foley sound techniques by longtime Barney collaborator Jonathan Bepler, also include invocations of city streets and the noises they emanate.
“Another thing we were thinking about is the way that Alex has worked in the center of Soho in the same studio forever,” Barney said. “There’s a way in which his practice has endured the commercialization of Soho and all the changes in the world around it. It has a constant, monastic energy, in spite of all that.”
The painting that Katz works on in the video—an imposing 8-by-10-foot abstraction in orange and white titled Road 25 (2024)—is on view upstairs. But before that, in a ground floor space that used to be an industrial kitchen, is Barney’s Water Cast 10 (2015), a large sculpture made by pouring molten bronze into a slurry of water and bentonite clay. “What happens is the gasses from the metal react with the water, as the water becomes steam, and create an explosion,” said Barney. “The metal blows back out into the room, and it leaves a hollow casting behind. These are exciting from a casting standpoint, because they’re made in just one instant. There’s no mold—it’s just fluid. They are direct castings of negative space.”
Barney said he connected with what he sees as an engagement with negative space by Katz in the painting that figures in the video, which is a part of a body of work that is more abstract and pared down than the style for which Katz is best known. “It would have been harder for me to connect to one of his figurative pieces,” Barney said. “There’s something about this body of work: they’re one color, and there’s a kind of directness. The fact that it is so reductive connects for me to the ‘Drawing Restraint’ language.”
He continued, focusing on the color that Katz chose for Road 25 and other related paintings scattered throughout the show: “The orange is like a kind of afterburn, a color that’s left behind from looking at something else. I assumed that to be the sky, because orange is the chromatic opposite of blue. If you look at the sky and then you look away from that blue to something white, you will see orange, which is why the color-field breaks [in the video] are blue. They’re chromatic opposites.”
The idea for a show pairing Barney with Katz—two titans of decidedly different kinds—originated with Juliano-Villani, who said she can hardly bear the thought of the exhibition coming to a close. “The show needs to stay together—it’s like the burning of the library of Alexandria,” she texted a few days ago. Die Schwerkraft davon ist viel größer als unser beschissenes Galerie.“
Sie sagte, die Idee sei ihr gekommen, als sie Katz‘ Retrospektive im Guggenheim Museum im Jahr 2022 sah. „Ich ging die Rampe des Guggenheim hinauf und sah die abstrakten Gemälde oben. Es gab eine Körperlichkeit in Alex‘ Arbeit, die mich an Matthew denken ließ. Ich bin so ein Idiot, dass ich nicht einmal realisiert habe, dass Matthew eine Ausstellung im Guggenheim gemacht hat. Sie sind beide wirklich gut in der filmischen Vision, wie bei der Bearbeitung eines Bildes. Sie machen sehr ähnliche Dinge, aber komplett anders – in meinem Kopf. Ich dachte, sie sollten verdammt noch mal zusammen eine Ausstellung machen.“
Über die Ergebnisse sagte Juliano-Villani: „Diese Ausstellung ist sehr bro Zen – sehr ausgewogen.“
„Es war eine lustige Idee, die sich irgendwie entwickelt hat“, sagte Billy Grant, Juliano-Villanis Partner in O’Flaherty’s. „Es ist schwer zu sagen, wann es zu einer echten Idee wurde. Wir waren überrascht, dass es zu einer realen Sache wurde, weil es so seltsam war, aber Matthew hat sich wirklich an die Spitze gesetzt. Wir haben ihm ein Problem gestellt und er hat es auf seine eigene Weise gelöst.“
Auf die Frage, was er von der Zusammenarbeit halte, antwortete Katz per E-Mail einfach: „Tolle Idee. Es war total bizarr.“
Der verlassene Restaurantraum, in dem die Barney/Katz-Ausstellung stattfindet, wurde nur für die Dauer der Ausstellung gesichert, sodass noch nicht klar ist, wo O’Flaherty’s – derzeit an seinem dritten Standort in drei Jahren – wieder auftauchen wird. Aber „The Bitch“ geht noch eine Woche weiter.
Was den Titel betrifft, bleibt die Bedeutung ein Rätsel, zu dem nur kryptische Hinweise in einem von Grant und Juliano-Villani für die Ausstellung verfassten Text angeboten werden. „Eine packende Geschichte von unerträglichem Horror, von Überleben und Widerstandsfähigkeit und von den Wegen, auf denen die Menschheit dem Tod gegenübertritt, ‚The Bitch‘ ist eine meisterhaft gestaltete Show, die auf subtile Weise episch ist,“ heißt es in dem Text.
Über Barney und Katz – beide „bekannt dafür, ihre Arbeit zu planen, bevor sie spontan ausführen“ – stellt das Pressestatement eine Frage: „Können sie wie Licht und Schatten sein, die einander Form geben?“
Und schließlich: „Am Ende bekommt die Arbeit all den Ruhm. Die Zicke ist nur der Plan und bekommt größtenteils die ganze Schuld.“