Matthew Barney will return to Aspen Art Museum’s AIR program on July 31 with a keynote at Aspen Meadows, Paepcke Auditorium, where the artist will discuss a body of work that links American mythologies, spectacle and violence. The talk is scheduled for 11 a.m. and is part of the Bluhm-Kaul Keynotes, made possible through a major gift from Barbara Bluhm-Kaul and Don Kaul.
The museum’s event listing frames Barney’s recent practice through the long arc of his career, noting that for more than three decades he has produced sculptures, performances and films that build symbolic worlds in which ritual, history, spectacle and violence converge. The keynote is positioned as a review of those themes, with particular attention to how Barney has used American settings and narratives to test how stories are inscribed, embodied, passed down and restaged.
Two recent films anchor that account. 'Redoubt' (2018), set in Idaho’s Sawtooth Mountains, reimagines Diana, the Roman goddess of the hunt, as a contemporary sharpshooter pursuing wolves through a snowbound landscape. 'SECONDARY' (2023) turns to another American arena, slowing and fragmenting a 1978 NFL hit that left one player paralyzed for life and took on a mythic status through repeated replay on sports media. Together, the works extend Barney’s interest in how violence becomes image, memory and legend.
The new appearance also follows Barney’s site-specific performance 'TACTICAL parallax', presented during the inaugural AIR in 2025 in a former military drill hall in Old Snowmass. According to the museum, that work drew on the theatrical language of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and transformed the arena into a shifting field of choreography, music, athleticism and collision, bringing figures from 'Redoubt' and 'SECONDARY' into the same performance space alongside new characters and iconographies drawn from Broadway.
This year, Barney returns with 'ZONE DEFENSE: Old Snowmass Parallax', described by AIR as a monumental installation that extends the narrative and spatial logic of 'TACTICAL parallax' on an open field adjacent to the original performance site. The installation is presented as holding the performance’s collision in “permanent and uneasy tension” with the surrounding aspens.
Barney’s keynote comes under the AIR 2026 banner, alongside a program that includes readings, concerts and performances across Aspen from July 27–31. The museum’s materials describe AIR as a week of commissions, performances and dialogues, while the Matthew Barney event specifically asks audiences to consider how classical mythology, modern history, sports and popular culture continue to shape the artist’s approach to the body and ritual.
