Matthew Barney

Matthew Barney is a San Francisco-born artist known for creating sculptural installations that merge performance art and video, exploring the limits of the body and sexuality. Barney draws upon his past as an athlete to create his work, which unfolds in spaces that combine the aesthetics of training camps and medical-research laboratories. His work often features actors dressed as sports figures engaging in metaphoric dances of sexual differentiation.

Barney's CREMASTER cycle, produced over eight years beginning in 1994, consists of five feature-length films that explore the male cremaster muscle's role in controlling testicular contractions in response to external stimuli. The cycle is rich in anatomical allusions to the embryonic process of sexual differentiation. Barney's subsequent work continued to build on the materials and motifs explored in the CREMASTER series, and his oeuvre includes sculpture, drawing, and photography.

His ongoing Drawing Restraint series, begun in 1987, explores the biochemical principle of hypertrophy, and his 2007 collaboration with composer Jonathan Bepler, The River of Fundament, presents an experimental opera that took five years to perform.

Barney has had solo exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Museum Boymans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, and has been featured in many international exhibitions, including Documenta in Kassel, Germany, and the Venice Biennale. Barney has been the recipient of numerous prestigious awards, including the Guggenheim Museum's Hugo Boss Prize and the James D. Phelan Art Award in Video by the Bay Area Video Coalition.