Matthew Barney

Matthew Barney is an American artist born in San Francisco in 1967. A versatile artist, he quickly became an important figure in contemporary art noted for his work in drawing, photography, films, sculpture... In 1988 the artist graduated from Yale after studying medicine and then following art education After graduating, the artist moved to New York in 1991 where he quickly began exhibiting his creations.

The artist is first of all interested in the performances of the body: he uses his body as an artistic vehicle and uses visceral materials as expressive mediums. This is why he transformed the Barbara Gladstone gallery in New York into a weight room where he subjected himself to tough tests of physical endurance All of his installations and performances are made up of hybrid characters, places and objects.

Matthew Barney is essentially known for his cycle of five Cremaster films made from 1994 to 2002. With this series the artist imposes his universe: he features hybrid beings, a fictional body For the realization of this project the artist emancipates himself from the borders between artistic disciplines; it mixes cinema, performance and sculpture. The themes highlighted are athletics and sexual identity which are at the heart of the artist's work. In 2002 Art Press underlined: “The Cremaster Cycle is one of the most singular and accomplished projects of contemporary creation in terms of its aesthetics, its complexity and its implications”. For the production of these five films with a total duration of seven hours, Matthew Barney wanted to reproduce in particular the ascension movement caused by the contraction of the cremaster muscle.

In the Drawing Restraint series that he began in 1987, the artist imposes obstacles such as trampolines, elastic bands and ramps in order to complicate the creation of his work. The artist questions the question of gender through his works, he reverses the representation of masculinity by allowing very little of the genital parts of the creatures to appear in his works.

The artist was exhibited at the Cartier Foundation in 19995, at the Lyon Biennale in 2013, at MoMA on various occasions, and at the Guggenheim Museum.