Matthew Barney Biography
Matteo Barney was an American artist born in San Francisco in 1967. He is considered one of the most influential contemporary artists, he uses the languages of cinema, sculpture and drawing to create works (such as videos, installations and performances) focused on the themes of processes vital, of the body and of sexual identity. He graduated from Yale in 1989 and moved to New York where he worked with gallery owner B. Gladstone. In the 1990s he began to present solo exhibitions all over the world, receiving prestigious awards (including the Hugo Boss Prize in 1996). His art fuses new technological media, disparate expressive forms and various and opposing artistic ideals as if he had absorbed all the most eclectic works of previous years, surpassing them in completeness and richness. Barney's interest remained linked to the imagination and the construction of an unparalleled cosmogony of powerful images, moving the artistic panorama through an enigmatic and visionary, post-human world. In his early works, sexual innuendos were combined with physical endurance and muscle strengthening. His past as a successful athlete, glamorous model, and brilliant student of anatomy courses at Yale were autobiographical aspects that became recurrent in his work. Barney was never absolute but always eclectic, and for this reason he was able to incorporate sculpture, photography and video art into the performance art philosophy of the 1970s, perfectly in tune with the new priorities of a younger generation. It is no coincidence that Barney has often been defined as a bulimic and voracious artist who is not afraid to assimilate everything and metabolize it in a revision of film genres - ranging from Kubrick to horror and western films, from Victorian comedies to the musicals of Busby Berkeley and Leni Riefenstahl's Third Reich footage - all imbued with a defiance of kitsch and bad taste. Among his best-known works are the Cremaster cycle (1994-2002, composed of five films with dreamlike and surreal features) and the unfinished project Drawing Restraint, which develops one of the most interesting aspects of his poetics: the exploration of the male body through effort extreme physical to generate a hypertrophic state, a subtle metaphor of artistic creation. Barney was one of the most representative artists of the last decade of a restless and revolutionary century like the twentieth century, and this is what we still need today. His detachment from reality translates into an apparent absence of judgement, in an imaginary universe suspended between natural and artificial, real and virtual, which can talk about the past as well as the present. In 2007 he won the prestigious Goslar Kaiser Ring.
