Matthew Barney was born in San Francisco in 1967; at age six, he moved to Idaho with his family. After his parents divorced, Barney continued to live with his father in Idaho, playing football on his high school team, and visiting his mother in New York City, where he was introduced to art and museums. This intermingling of sports and art informs his work as a sculptor and filmmaker. After graduating from Yale in 1991, Barney entered the art world to almost instant controversy and success.
Executed, filmed and presented in Gladstone's 21st Street gallery, the work is performed as a duet between dancer Raphael Xavier (SECONDARY's Jack Tatum) and Barney (as quarterback Ken Stabler). Half performance and half presentation of trace, the work cha ...
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Secondary maps two different narratives onto each other, using movement as the formal through-line. The first describes the complex overlay of violence and spectacle inherent in American football, and more broadly within American culture. Barney's personal ...
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In September 2021, Barney and Bepler presented a live performance at Schaulager titled 'Catasterism in Three Movements.' CATASTERISM draws from documentation of those performances and expands the narrative with cinematic scenes filmed in the galleries and ...
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The goddess Diana and her two attendants traverse the rugged terrain of Idaho's Sawtooth Mountains in pursuit of the elusive wolf. An Engraver (Matthew Barney) furtively documents their actions in copper engravings and provokes a series of confrontations. ...
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Esoteric rituals are enacted within the vicinity of a Dunkin' Donuts—itself housed in a shopping center—located in Reykjavík, Iceland, wherein Nammu, Sumerian goddess of creation, is found to be an employee. ...
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Presented as part of the exhibition "RIVER OF FUNDAMENT", Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. ...
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Visionary artist Matthew Barney returns to cinema with this 3-part epic, a radical reinvention of Norman Mailer's novel Ancient Evenings. In collaboration with composer Jonathan Bepler, Barney combines traditional modes of narrative cinema with filmed elem ...
Watch NowThe latest installment in the monumental Drawing Restraint series, which merges sculpture, athleticism and cryptic symbolism into a stunning meditation on art-making and physical exertion. ...
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The first collaboration between Matthew Barney & Elizabeth Peyton, Blood of Two is a unique, site-specific work that draws its references from Hydra itself – the surrounding environment, animals, humans, and local traditions are all part of the project i ...
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A compilation of erotic films intended to illuminate the points where art meets sexuality. ...
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Commissioned as part of the Destricted Short Film Series, 'Hoist' was shot in Bahia, Salvador. It's described by the director as "a juxtaposition of sexuality and industrial machinery". ...
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American WWII soldiers open a mold, exposing a solid architectural structure made entirely of petroleum jelly. The soldiers violently soften the structure with shovels. The wall of a large metal box slams down revealing Douglas MacArthur (played by Matth ...
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The film concerns the theme of self-imposed limitation and continues Matthew Barney's interest in religious rite, this time focusing on Shinto. ...
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An ordinary family goes on a trip by car, but their car breaks down. The dutiful father of the family immediately sets off to get help and seems to find it with a nice elderly lady. The woman invites the whole family to dinner, but the hospitality soon tur ...
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CREMASTER 3 is set in New York City and narrates the construction of the Chrysler Building, which is in itself a character - host to inner, antagonistic forces at play for access to the process of (spiritual) transcendence. These factions find form in the ...
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CREMASTER 2 is rendered as a gothic Western that introduces conflict into the system. On the biological level it corresponds to the phase of fetal development during which sexual division begins. In Matthew Barney's abstraction of this process, the system ...
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CREMASTER 5 is a five-act opera (sung in Hungarian) set in late-ninteenth century Budapest. The last film in the series, it represents the moment when the testicles are finally released and sexual differentiation is fully attained. The lamenting tone of th ...
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A video installation in which Satyrs grapple in a limousine as it drives through the tunnels of New York City. While one satyr chases its tail in the front seat, another attempts to make a drawing in the condensation-coated sunroof of the limousine using t ...
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CREMASTER 1 is a musical revue performed on the blue Astroturf playing field of Bronco Stadium in Boise, Idaho - Matthew Barney's hometown. Two Goodyear Blimps float above the arena like the airships that often transmit live sporting events via television ...
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CREMASTER 4 adheres most closely to the project's biological model. This penultimate episode describes the system's onward rush toward descension despite its resistance to division. The logo for this chapter is the Manx triskelion - three identical armored ...
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A "video action" in which Barney crosses the ceiling of the Gladstone Gallery using a harness and ice-climbing screws, propelling himself by the forces of muscle and will. ...
Watch NowOne of two videos shown in Barney's installation piece "REPRESSIA (decline)" ...
Watch NowMatthew Barney, in a harness suspended from the ceiling, leaps around a room and lowers himself onto gobs of petroleum jelly. ...
Watch NowHesitation to recover a dropped pearl results in a delay-of-game penalty play. ...
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Goo, orifice fixation, medical procedures, non-human/inanimate entities considered as bodies. Scabaction records the welding of a sculpture, some antics with Vaseline, and the removal of an ingrown hair. ...
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Secondary maps two different narratives onto each other, using movement as the formal through-line. The first describes the complex overlay of violence and spectacle inherent in American football, and more broadly within American culture. Barney's personal ...
Watch NowThe goddess Diana and her two attendants traverse the rugged terrain of Idaho's Sawtooth Mountains in pursuit of the elusive wolf. An Engraver (Matthew Barney) furtively documents their actions in copper engravings and provokes a series of confrontations. ...
Watch NowVisionary artist Matthew Barney returns to cinema with this 3-part epic, a radical reinvention of Norman Mailer's novel Ancient Evenings. In collaboration with composer Jonathan Bepler, Barney combines traditional modes of narrative cinema with filmed elem ...
Watch NowThe latest installment in the monumental Drawing Restraint series, which merges sculpture, athleticism and cryptic symbolism into a stunning meditation on art-making and physical exertion. ...
Watch Now
How does artist Matthew Barney use 45,000 pounds of petroleum jelly, a factory whaling vessel and traditional Japanese rituals to create his latest art project? Barney plowed the waters off the coast of Nagasaki to film his massive endeavor, Drawing Restra ...
Watch NowAmerican WWII soldiers open a mold, exposing a solid architectural structure made entirely of petroleum jelly. The soldiers violently soften the structure with shovels. The wall of a large metal box slams down revealing Douglas MacArthur (played by Matth ...
Watch NowThe film concerns the theme of self-imposed limitation and continues Matthew Barney's interest in religious rite, this time focusing on Shinto. ...
Watch NowFor his five Cremaster films Matthew Barney's created a multitude of sculptural forms and structures. Recently both the sculptures and the films traveled to museums in Cologne, Paris and New York's Guggenheim. In THE CREMASTER CYCLE: A Conversation with Ma ...
Watch NowCREMASTER 3 is set in New York City and narrates the construction of the Chrysler Building, which is in itself a character - host to inner, antagonistic forces at play for access to the process of (spiritual) transcendence. These factions find form in the ...
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With the five-part Cremaster Cycle of films, multi-award-winning artist Matthew Barney invented a densely layered and interconnected sculptural world that surreally combines sports, biology, sexuality, history, and mythology as it organically evolves. In t ...
Watch NowCREMASTER 2 is rendered as a gothic Western that introduces conflict into the system. On the biological level it corresponds to the phase of fetal development during which sexual division begins. In Matthew Barney's abstraction of this process, the system ...
Watch NowCREMASTER 5 is a five-act opera (sung in Hungarian) set in late-ninteenth century Budapest. The last film in the series, it represents the moment when the testicles are finally released and sexual differentiation is fully attained. The lamenting tone of th ...
Watch NowCREMASTER 4 adheres most closely to the project's biological model. This penultimate episode describes the system's onward rush toward descension despite its resistance to division. The logo for this chapter is the Manx triskelion - three identical armored ...
Watch NowFilmmaker Aryan Kaganof goes behind the scenes of Matthew Barney's impossible to find short "March of the Anal Sadistic Warrior (1998). ...
Watch NowA "video action" in which Barney crosses the ceiling of the Gladstone Gallery using a harness and ice-climbing screws, propelling himself by the forces of muscle and will. ...
Watch NowMatthew Barney, in a harness suspended from the ceiling, leaps around a room and lowers himself onto gobs of petroleum jelly. ...
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