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Matthew Barney

Matthew Barney
image via IndieWire
b. 1967
Lives and works in:

New York, NY

Represented by:

Gladstone Gallery

Education includes:

Yale BA, New Haven, CT

Barney is a contemporary artist who works in several mediums including film, sculpture, photography, drawing and performance art. His compositions are often overly decadent, and even fantastical. The involve a mysterious symbolic system that alludes to associative dream states as described by Freud, offering a living and photographed quality, as opposed to a painted or surreal.

Cremaster 3

Cremaster 3, image via ArtRage


His works have been exhibited around the globe and has gained much attention thanks to his “Cremaster” film series. He is featured in the permanent collections of the Guggemheim, MOMA New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and several others.
Many of his pieces incorporate a performance aspect, including his 2006 “Drawing Restraint 13: The Instrument of Surrender” in which the artist
dressed like General Douglas MacArthur and walked into a vat of petroleum jelly.
He lives with his partner, Icelandic singer Bjork, and their child.

Cremaster 4

Cremaster 4, image via ArtRage

Drawing Restraint 9 at Serpentine Gallery [ArtObserved]
Guardian of the Veil at Regen projects L.A. [ArtObserved]

The Cremaster Cycle via www.babylonberlin.de

The Cremaster Cycle- via www.babylonberlin.de

Wikipedia Entry

Artist’s Website

The Official Cremaster Cycle
Matthew Barney DVDs:

Matthew Barney Books:

More information coming soon.

Comments and suggestions: info@artobserved.com