Matthew Barney
Director · b. 1967 · San Francisco
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.
Movies12
Movie6.1DramaFantasyVisionary 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 elements of performance, sculpture, and opera, reconstructing Mailer’s hypersexual story of Egyptian gods and the seven stages of reincarnation, alongside the rise and fall of the American car industry.
River of Fundament
2014 · 19 votes
Movie6.3FantasyHorrorCREMASTER 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 resists partition and tries to remain in the state of equilibrium imagined in Cremaster 1.
Cremaster 2
1999 · 28 votes
Movie4.4DocumentaryHow 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 Restraint 9. The documentary Matthew Barney: No Restraint journeys to Japan with Barney and his collaborator Bjork, as the visual artist creates a "narrative sculpture" telling a fantastical love story of two characters that transform from land mammals into whales.
Matthew Barney: No Restraint
2006 · 7 votes
MovieDocumentaryA "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.
Blind Perineum
1991
Movie2.7AdventureFantasyThe 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. The characters communicate through dance, letting movement replace language as they pursue each other and their prey.
Redoubt
2019 · 3 votes
Movie6.0DramaMusicCREMASTER 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 the opera suggests that Barney invisions this as a moment of tragedy and loss. The primary character is the Queen of Chain (played by Ursula Andress). Barney, himself, plays three characters who appear in the mind of the Queen: her Diva, Magician, and Giant. The Magician is a stand-in for Harry Houdini, who was born in Budapest in 1874 and appears as a recurring character in the Cremaster cycle.
Cremaster 5
1997 · 26 votes
Movie6.6DramaFantasyCREMASTER 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 struggle between Hiram Abiff or the Architect...
Cremaster 3
2002 · 35 votes
Movie6.2FantasyThe film concerns the theme of self-imposed limitation and continues Matthew Barney's interest in religious rite, this time focusing on Shinto.
Drawing Restraint 9
2006 · 24 votes
Movie6.0FantasyCREMASTER 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 legs revolving around a central axis. Set on the Isle of Man, the film absorbs the island's folklore...
Cremaster 4
1995 · 27 votes
- MovieDramaMusic
The Cremaster Cycle is a series of five feature-length films, together with related sculptures, photographs, drawings, and artist's books, created by American visual artist and filmmaker Matthew Barney.
- Movie
The 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.
- MovieTV MovieDocumentary
For 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 Matthew Barney, the artist guides the camera through this remarkable creation at the Guggenheim Museum while being questioned by Michael Kimmelman, chief art critic of the New York Times.