There’s 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.
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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. “The gravity of it is way bigger than our shitty gallery.”
She said the idea struck her when she saw Katz’s retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in 2022. “I was walking up [the ramp of the Guggenheim] and saw the abstract paintings toward the top. There was a physicality to Alex’s work that made me think about Matthew. I’m such an idiot that I didn’t even realize Matthew did a show at the Guggenheim. They’re both really good at cinematic vision, like in the editing of an image. They do very similar things but completely differently—in my brain. I was like, they should fucking do a show together.”
About the results, Juliano-Villani said, “It’s very bro Zen, this show—very balanced.”
“It was a funny idea that kind of evolved,” said Billy Grant, Juliano-Villani’s partner in O’Flaherty’s. “It’s hard to say when it became a real idea. We were surprised that it became a real thing, because it was so weird, but Matthew really took the lead on it. We gave him a problem and he solved it in his own way.”
Asked what he thought of the pairing, Katz, via email, said simply, “Great idea. It was totally bizarre.”
The derelict restaurant space that plays home to the Barney/Katz exhibition was secured only for the duration of the show, so it remains to be seen where O’Flaherty’s—currently in its third location in three years—will rise again. But “The Bitch” continues for one more week.
As for the title, the meaning of it is a mystery for which only cryptic hints are offered in a bit of text written by Grant and Juliano-Villani for the show. “A gripping tale of unrelieved horror, of survival and resilience, and of the ways in which humankind confronts death, ‘The Bitch’ is a masterfully crafted show, eloquently understated and epic in scope,” the text reads.
About Barney and Katz—both “known for planning before spontaneously executing their work”—the press release poses a question: “Can they be like light and shadow, giving shape to each other?”
And then, in conclusion: “In the end the work gets all the glory. The bitch is just the plan, and mostly gets all the blame.”
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