Matthew Barney (b. 1967)

Contemporary Mythologies and Symbolic Physicality

Matthew Barney is one of the most enigmatic and influential figures in contemporary art. Born in San Francisco in 1967 and educated at Yale, his work operates at the intersection of sculpture, cinema, performance, and drawing — creating a visual universe that is as symbolic as it is visceral. His artistic language delves into themes of transformation, desire, mythology, and the limits of the human body.

Barney rose to prominence in the 1990s with his ambitious Cremaster Cycle (1994–2002), a five-part, non-linear film epic accompanied by large-scale sculptures, installations, photographs, and drawings. The cycle weaves together references to biology, architecture, sports history, alchemy, and opera in a dreamlike and allegorical narrative. Each installment inhabits a distinct world of visual excess and esoteric storytelling.

Physicality plays a central role in his practice — influenced in part by his background as a competitive athlete — with the body often portrayed as a site of tension between control and transformation. His sculptural works employ unconventional materials such as petroleum jelly, lead, silicone, bronze, and industrial polymers, emphasizing tactility and material metaphor.

In addition to Cremaster, his major projects include the Drawing Restraint series, exploring the idea of creativity born from constraint, and the operatic River of Fundament (2014), a bold adaptation of Norman Mailer’s Ancient Evenings that fuses myth, metallurgy, and American industrial decline.

Barney’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Guggenheim Museum New York, MOCA Los Angeles, Fondation Beyeler, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among many others.

Rather than narrate, Barney constructs mythologies — immersive symbolic systems where sculpture, performance, and film converge into a single, evolving vision. His work challenges viewers to enter a world of ritual, transformation, and erotic materiality, suspended between the sublime and the corporeal.