Matthew Barney – Sport and fine arts instead of plastic surgery
Matthew Barney was born on 25 March 1967 in San Francisco, California. His mother exhibited artistic talent as an abstract painter, and she moved to New York following her divorce, where her son regularly visited her. As with many young boys, Matthew Barney was interested in sport, played football, and practiced wrestling. These experiences would later shape his artistic work, with sport and the physical exertion of the human body playing a central role in his art. His earliest works were presented in the sport complex of Yale University in New Haven where he had begun a course in medicine. After two semesters, however, Barney recognised that he was not suited to plastic surgery and turned instead to art. During his studies, he worked as a photo model, amongst others for Ralph Lauren, and in 1989 graduated from a fine art course with his final work Field Dressing (orofill), an early installation involving sculptures and videos.
Physical struggle for the creation of a work of art
Matthew Barney is interested in the human body and human sexuality in his art; for him, the two are closely and inextricably joined. In his films and sculptures, he also takes references from classical and modern myths, from popular and sometimes controversial figures such as the magician Harry Houdini, the US General MacArthur, and the robbery murderer Gary Gilmore. Barney caused a great sensation with his twelve-part series Drawing Restraint, which he developed between 1988 and 2005. The core idea was the construction of a special situation that imposed a deliberate physical restriction on the artist himself. Thus, he drew, almost naked, climbing on the walls and ceilings, jumping on a trampoline, fixed by plastic tubes, and at the same time turned the creative act into an energetic performance. Barney expanded this concept later with video installations to integrate narrative sequences into his performance. In these films, actors dressed as satyrs could be seen, for example, driving in a limousine through Manhattan, performing an erotically charged game.
Inspiration from horror cinema, modern art, and psychoanalysis
Matthew Barney admits unabashedly and outright that he draws much of his inspiration from US American pop culture. In particular, horror films such as Jaws, The Exorcist, The Omen or The Shining serve as models, as do personal records of football games. The important video artists of the 1970s and 1980s naturally also play a role: Matthew Barney knows and cites works by Joseph Beuys, Marina Abramovic and Bruce Nauman, sharing a preference for Vaseline with Beuys as an important prop. He also pays extensive attention to the findings of psychanalysis.
Matthew Barney lives and works in New York.
Matthew Barney - Works that have already been sold at Kunsthaus Lempertz:
