In classical myth, the goddess Diana turned the hunter Actaeon into a stag after he caught sight of her bathing. The object appears to be turning inside-out, in an echo of Barney’s earlier sculpture Basin Creek Burn, 2018, where the core and exterior of a tree harvested from the Sawtooth Mountains were cast in one process, with the tree itself acting as a mold for the molten metal.Ĭosmic Hunt stands as a reference to the character of Diana in Redoubt (played by Anette Wachter), a modern-day sharpshooter who uses a rifle mounted on a bipod to track the wolf, framing the animal in her telescopic sights. Caught between the status of a lanced corpse and a constellation, the animal is in the midst of catasterism – transformation into a celestial body.īarney’s sculpture dramatizes the central themes of Redoubt – the dual enmity and interdependence of men and animals, the collision of nature and technology, and the porous boundary between present-day reality and myth (the artist has spoken of the film’s depiction of the landscape as “grounded in the real.”) Poised on sleek tubular legs, the entire sculptural structure suggests a character in the throes of a metamorphosis – mechanical, animate, fossilised.
The creature is slung like a trophy, its bristling fur seeming to merge with the complex topography of the sculpture, and pierced by spears terminating in tiny coronae. The wolf alludes to the leitmotif of Redoubt: a wolf hunt that unfolds in six choreographed movements over the course of the film. At its pinnacle lies an eviscerated wolf, rendered in crystalline detail from a scanned model of the wolf’s body, notably, Barney’s first directly figurative sculpture. Elevated on a bipod, its central ‘barrel’ resembles an amalgam of fractured bark, machined metal and scaly sheathing. The sculpture and drawings find their origins in the artist’s acclaimed 2018 film Redoubt, in which ancient and modern myths of creation and retribution are transposed into the spectacular wilderness of the remote Sawtooth mountain region of Idaho.Īt the centre of the exhibition, the Cosmic Hunt sculpture embodies the morphed skeleton of a burned tree, taking the form of a telescope or mounted artillery, and rendered on a monumental scale in intricately articulated stainless steel.
Installation image Matthew Barney, Cos mic Hunt, Cosmic Hunt, an exhibition of new work by Matthew Barney, centres on a monumental sculpture in cast stainless steel of the same name, together with twenty drawings rendered in finely scribed detail.
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