![]() Matthew Barney has been the subject of many solo, survey, and group exhibitions. Presentations of Barney's films, including those as part of the Cremaster cycle, are often co-ordinated with adjacent site-specific installations which include displays in ground-breaking methods of mark-making, metalwork or plastic casting. Rich in unorthodox narrative, hybridity, and symbolism, involving actors, animals, and machines-and multiple time or geographical zones-they thematically incorporate contemporary novels, music, opera, hunting, crime, and religious ritual. Other acclaimed movies include River of Fundament (2014) and Redoubt (2019). The Cremaster cycle of five films (1994-2002)-the point of departure for which is the male cremaster muscle, which controls testicular contractions in response to external stimuli-first revealed Barney's visionary filmmaking skills. In his working method, drawings are created to plan his sculptures, installations, photographs, and films, and later, further drawn visual investigations continue after the projects are completed. Matthew Barney's artworks include a series of nineteen Drawing Restraint projects (documented from 1987-present). Looking at muscular growth - how it occurs only through restraint, breakdown, and healing-with its exceptionally wide range of cross-disciplinary references the show attracted much attention. He funded this ambitious project by working as a clothing catalogue model. In 1991 Barney had a debut solo exhibition with Barbara Gladstone consisting of performance, video, photographs, drawing, and sculpture. That year he went to New York and participated the following year in group shows at Althea Viafora Gallery. His thesis project was a performance/installation titled Field Dressing (1989), presented in a gymnasium, which emphasised the fetishisation of the body and was an early indication of a continued fascination with eroticism and the extremes of physicality. It was while visiting her that he became interested in art, up until that point, sport having been his dominant passion.Įntering Yale University in Connecticut he won an American football scholarship, and intended to become a plastic surgeon, but he changed his major to art, being allowed-as an undergraduate-to precociously enrol in the graduate programme. Early Yearsīarney was raised in California and then Idaho, his parents divorcing when he was 12 - his mother (an abstract painter) leaving to live in New York. The breadth and complexity of his unpredictable poetic imagination, and the scope of the unconventional technologies he employs, are what make Barney's artistic endeavours so distinctive.īetween 20 Barney is well-known to have been in a relationship with the Icelandic musician Bjork.īarney lives in New York with studios in Queens and the Sawtooth Mountains. ![]() It is the definitive publication on this important series, and offers a key to understanding many of the themes that thread throughout Barney’s oeuvre.Barney's feature-length movies and innovative performances and sculptural installations, which examine the physical hardships of sport and its sexual undercurrents to explore the limits of the body, often incorporate highly unorthodox materials such as frozen petroleum jelly, wax, and tapioca and include a cast of humans, animals and machines. Featuring an illuminating introduction by Nancy Spector an essay by Maggie Nelson on the works’ exploration of psychology, bodies, image-making, narrative, and abstraction and a new text by the artist, this generously illustrated volume includes previously unpublished artist’s sketches, behind-the-scenes photographs, research material, and video stills. ![]() ![]() Titled after former football player Jim Otto, the series explores the training, discipline, and physical limits of the body alongside questions of sexual difference and desire. Matthew Barney: OTTO Trilogy is the first book to trace the progression of three significant early projects- Facility of INCLINE, Facility of DECLINE, and OTTOshaft- and to reveal the narrative system that links them. A generously illustrated look at the intricate narrative threads of three of the artist’s earliest works, and their continued resonance todayĬelebrated for works blending performance, video, and sculpture, Matthew Barney has created complex narratives that emerge across series since his earliest exhibitions.
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