Matthew Barney

Matthew Barney (born March 25, 1967) is an American contemporary artist and film director who works in the fields of sculpture, film, photography and drawing.

His works explore connections among geography, biology, geology and mythology as well as notable themes of sex, intercourse, and conflict.

His early pieces were sculptural installations combined with performance and video.

Matthew Barney was born March 25, 1967, as the younger of two children in San Francisco, California, where he lived until he was 7.

He lived in Boise, Idaho from 1973 to 1985, where his father got a job administering a catering service at Boise State University and where he attended elementary, middle, and high school.

His parents divorced and his mother, an abstract painter, moved to New York City, where he would frequently visit.

It was there where he was first introduced to the art scene.

Barney was recruited by Yale University in 1985 to play football and planned to go into pre-med, but he also intended to study art.

The Drawing Restraint series began in 1987 as a series of studio experiments, drawing upon an athletic model of development in which growth occurs only through restraint: the muscle encounters resistance, becomes engorged and is broken down, and in healing becomes stronger.

In literally restraining the body while attempting to make a drawing, Drawing Restraint 1–6 (1987–89) were documentations made using video and photography.

In 1989, he graduated from Yale.

His earliest works, created at Yale, were staged at the university's Payne Whitney Gymnasium.

In the 1990s, Barney moved to New York, where he worked as a catalog model, a career that helped him finance his early work as an artist.

Drawing Restraint 7 marks the influx of narrative and characterization, resulting in a three channel video and a series of drawings and photographs, for which Barney was awarded the Aperto Prize in the 1993 Venice Biennale.

Between 1994 and 2002, he created The Cremaster Cycle, a series of five films described by Jonathan Jones in The Guardian as "one of the most imaginative and brilliant achievements in the history of avant-garde cinema."

Matthew Barney's epic Cremaster cycle (1994–2002) is a self-enclosed aesthetic system consisting of five feature-length films that explore processes of creation.

The cycle unfolds not just cinematically, but also through the photographs, drawings, sculptures, and installations the artist produces in conjunction with each episode.

Its conceptual departure point is the male cremaster muscle, which controls testicular contractions in response to external stimuli.

Barney's long-time collaborator Jonathan Bepler composed and arranged the films’ soundtracks.

The project is rife with anatomical allusions to the position of the reproductive organs during the embryonic process of sexual differentiation: Cremaster 1 represents the most "ascended" or undifferentiated state, Cremaster 5 the most "descended" or differentiated.

The cycle repeatedly returns to those moments during early sexual development in which the outcome of the process is still unknown.

In Barney's metaphoric universe, these moments represent a condition of pure potentiality.

As the cycle evolved over eight years, Barney looked beyond biology as a way to explore the creation of form, employing narrative models from other realms, such as biography, mythology, and geology.

The photographs, drawings, and sculptures radiate outward from the narrative core of each film installment.

Barney's photographs—framed in plastic and often arranged in diptychs and triptychs that distill moments from the plot—often emulate classical portraiture.

In 2002, Barney had a daughter with his then partner, the singer Björk, with whom he lived in a penthouse co-op in Brooklyn Heights.

A series of ten vitrines containing drawings, Drawing Restraint 8 was included in the 2003 Venice Biennale and prefigured the narrative development for Drawing Restraint 9 (2005).

A major project consisting of a feature-length film and soundtrack composed by Björk, large-scale sculptures, photographs and drawings, Drawing Restraint 9 was built upon themes such as the Shinto religion, the tea ceremony, the history of whaling, and the supplantation of blubber with refined petroleum for oil.

He is also known for his projects Drawing Restraint 9 (2005), River of Fundament (2014) and Redoubt (2018).

Drawing Restraint 10 – 16 (2005–07) are site-specific performances that recall the earlier Yale pieces.

A full-scale survey of Barney's work through Drawing Restraint 9 was held at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2006 and included over 150 objects of varying media.

Drawing Restraint 17 and 18 were performed at the Schaulager in Basel in 2010 in conjunction with the exhibition "Prayer Sheet with the Wound and the Nail," a survey of the Drawing Restraint series through Drawing Restraint 18.

Drawing Restraint 19 employs a skateboard as a drawing tool.

A block of graphite is mounted beneath the skateboard deck on the front end of the board.

A skater performs a nose manual (a wheelie on the nose of the board, leaning in the direction of movement) across a smooth surface, tipping the nose of the board forward and leaving behind a drawn graphite line.

The piece was part of a benefit art show and auction titled "Good Wood", raising awareness and funds for Power House Productions' Ride It Sculpture Park in Detroit, Michigan.

By September 2013, Barney and Björk were no longer a couple; Björk chronicled the breakup in her 2015 album Vulnicura.

, Barney maintained a studio in Long Island City, Queens.

The riding was performed on site by skateboarder Lance Mountain, documented by photographer Joe Brook and published by Juxtapoz Magazine in their February 2013 issue.

The board was purchased by People Skate and Snowboard and it is displayed at their only location in Keego Harbor, Michigan.