Published to accompany the Serpentine Gallery exhibition (20 September – 11 November 2007), Drawing Restraint Volume V includes new texts on Barney’s Drawing Restraint series by New York-based writer and curator Neville Wakefield, Serpentine Gallery Chief Curator Kitty Scott and a short story by the award-winning Icelandic poet and lyricist Sjón. The book also includes previously unpublished images of Barney’s recent artworks.

Matthew Barney’s exhibition at the Serpentine presents works from his Drawing Restraint series, which he began in 1987 while still in art school. Inspired by the idea of resistance training, he applied restraints to his body while drawing, exhibiting the resulting drawings, props and video documentation of the performances in the spaces where the actions had taken place. The Drawing Restraint series investigates the relationship between resistance and creativity and artistic and athletic bodies working at the threshold of physical limitations.