Matthew Barney Installs New Sculpture at Aspen Art Museum's AIR Festival

Matthew Barney has unveiled a new sculpture, ZONE DEFENSE: Old Snowmass Parallax, on a tract of open land in Snowmass, Colorado, as part of the Aspen Art Museum's AIR festival. The work relates to Barney's performance last year in a former military drill hall on a nearby cattle ranch. The sculpture is on view through the summer with visitation upon request.

The sculpture connects to the performance through a standing structure that was originally PVC piping in the live event, now rendered in painted stainless steel to create a trompe l'oeil effect. The weights at the base are cast bronze painted to mimic their gym counterparts, and the two draped football jerseys at the top are cast aluminum, serving as a memorial to Darryl Stingley and Jack Tatum, central figures in Barney's 2023 film and sculpture series Secondary.

The installation also includes orange end-zone markers that diagram the field, drawing from the performance's parallax structure. The markers are placed to form intersecting diagonal lines at a larger scale, echoing the drawing made during the performance. Barney noted that the piece is diagrammatic, connecting to his drawing practice.

The sculpture's material choices were practical, given its outdoor location, with the lower structure in stainless steel, upper part in cast aluminum, and weights in bronze. The trompe l'oeil paint allowed Barney to retain the primary colors of the weights and the color narrative of the jerseys, which evoke both Olympic bumper plates and the American flag.