Matthew Barney’s Time Has Come Again

Something curious happened to Matthew Barney over the last 15 years: He became underrated.

The artist spent the 1990s crafting strange, gooey collisions of athletic resistance and body horror. His early “Cremaster Cycle” (1994-2002), an ever-growing system of films, sculptures and photographs culminating at the Guggenheim Museum when he was just 35, seemed to ratify his place at the pinnacle of new American art.

But he struggled, for nearly a decade afterward, with the immense “River of Fundament” (2007-2014), a lumbering marriage of ancient Egyptian myth and American car culture. Time passed. Tastes changed. Museums indulged in a Barney-phobic vogue for sculpture that was unmonumental, provisional and both physically and intellectually flimsy.

Barney’s approach, though, like the petroleum jelly he sculpted in his early days, did not stay fixed. Quietly, he devised daring new methods of bronze casting. Privately, he invited younger artists to reimagine his early performances with bungee cords and harnesses. Now in his 50s, Barney has been doing the best work of his career.

The sublime “Redoubt” (2019) and melancholy “Secondary” (2023) rechanneled Barney’s early interest in sport and his gaze on the American northwest into new media, such as electroplates and ceramics. Both projects revitalized his multimedia practice by introducing the new element of dance — specifically of contact improvisation, which requires performers to rebalance their movements in response to their partners. What emerged has been more delicate, more subdued, more generous and more at liberty than any of his youthful plastinations.

The “Secondary” project is currently the subject of a major show at the Cartier Foundation in Paris. Here in New York, at Gladstone Gallery for a few more days, an exhibition of related sculptures and videos reveals the freer Barney you may have missed.