Matthew Barney Biography Matthew Barney was born in San Francisco in 1967 and was raised in Boise, Idaho. He attended college at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, receiving his BA in 1989. Thereafter, he moved to New York City, where he lives and works today. From his earliest work, Barney has explored the transcendence of physical limitations in a multimedia art practice that includes feature-length films, video installations, sculpture, photography, and drawing. His thesis exhibition at Yale, Field Dressing (1989), featured an installation of video and sculptural objects that combined the physicality of sports, the fetishistic nature of athletic equipment, and the endurance involved in performance art. Between 1988 and 1993, Barney developed the Drawing Restraint series for which he devised situations of self-imposed restriction, such as jumping on a trampoline, climbing over obstacles, or restraining himself with surgical latex hosing, through which he would produce artworks. In this series he explored the feasibility of creating something under severe physical constraints, just as one tears down muscle tissue in order to build it up through weight lifting. In his first solo exhibitions, [facility of INCLINE] and [facility of DECLINE] (both 1991), held at Stuart Regen Gallery, Los Angeles, and at Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York, respectively, Barney exhibited elaborate sculptural installations, which included videos of himself interacting with various constructed objects and performing physical feats such as climbing across the gallery ceiling suspended from titanium ice screws in performances entitled BLIND PERINEUM and MILE HIGH Threshold: FLIGHT with the ANAL SADISTIC WARRIOR. The related sculptures, including case BOLUS (1989–91), TRANSEXUALIS (1991), and REPRESSIA (1991), are environments containing such athletic items as wrestling mats, a walk-in cooler, a cast petroleum jelly incline bench, and dumbbells of cast petroleum wax. Between 1990 and 1991, Barney also created video, photography, and sculptural pieces such as The Jim Otto Suite (1991) (with subsections titled OTTOblow and AUTOblow), which feature fictional characters who function as metaphors for thematic motifs that run throughout the work: football hero Jim Otto and the "Character of Positive Restraint," in either the guise of escape artist Harry Houdini or the feminine Jim Blind, who appears in drag. These works, along with those listed above, were featured in Barney's first solo museum exhibition organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1991–1992. In 1992, Barney introduced fantastical creatures into his work, a gesture that presaged the vocabulary of his subsequent narrative films. The multi-channel video installation OTTOshaft (1992), which premiered at Documenta IX, Kassel, Germany (1992), features bands of dueling bagpipers. And Drawing Restraint 7 (1993), which was shown in that year's Biennial Exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and in Aperto '93, the 45th Venice Biennale, includes mythological satyrs, who battle for supremacy while riding in and out of Manhattan in a limousine. In 1994, Barney began work on his epic Cremaster cycle, a five-part film project accompanied by related sculptures, photographs, and drawings. Eschewing chronological order, Barney first produced Cremaster 4 (1994), which premiered with an exhibition of related works at the Fondation Cartier pour l'Art Contemporain, Paris, in March 1995. Drawings and photographs from Cremaster 4 were exhibited in the 1995 Biennial Exhibition, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. The second completed film, Cremaster 1 (1995), premiered at the New York Video Festival in October 1995. Both films were also included in Barney's solo exhibition PACE CAR for the HUBRIS PILL at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, in 1995, which traveled to cpac Musée d'Art Contemporain, Bordeaux, and Kunsthalle Bern in 1996. Sculpture, photographs, and drawings from Cremaster 1 were exhibited along with the film at Kunsthalle Wien in 1997 in a show that traveled to the Museum für Gegenwartskunst Basel in 1998. Cremaster 5 (1997) received its premiere at Portikus, Frankfurt, in June 1997. The installations, sculptures, photographs, and drawings that comprise the rest of the Cremaster 5 project were exhibited in a solo exhibition at the Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York, in 1997. Cremaster 2 (1999) premiered at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, in July 1999, within a sculptural theater installation created by the artist. Acquired jointly by the Walker and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, this installation and film were exhibited by the latter in 2000. The premiere of Cremaster 3 (2002) took place at the Ziegfeld Theater, New York, under the auspices of Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Matthew Barney: The Cremaster Cycle, an exhibition of artwork from the entire cycle organized by the Guggenheim Museum, premiered at the Museum Ludwig, Cologne, in June 2002 and subsequently traveled to the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in October 2002. All five films of the cycle, along with the site-specific sculpture CREMASTER Field (2002), were presented by Artangel at the Ritzy Cinema, London, in October–November 2002. In addition, the films have been seen in film festivals worldwide, including Slamdance Film Festival, Park City, Utah (1998); 27th International Film Festival, Rotterdam (1998); Nat Film Festival, Copenhagen (1998); Images Festival of Independent Film and Video, Toronto (1998, 2000, and 2002); International Film Festival, Cleveland (1999); 23rd Göteborg Film Festival, Sweden (2000); Berlin International Film Festival (2000); The Hamptons International Film Festival (2001); IFIstanbul: 1st AFM/International Independent Film Festival, Istanbul (2002); and Sundance Film Festival, Park City, Utah (2003). Since 1992 Barney has participated in numerous important international group exhibitions including Documenta IX, Kassel (1992); Post Human, organized by FAE Musée d'Art Contemporain, Pully/Lausanne, Switzerland (1992); 1993 Biennial Exhibition, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1993); Aperto '93, 45th Venice Biennale (1993); Hors Limites: L'Art et la vie 1952–1994, Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (1994); The Masculine Masquerade, MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts (1995); Yksityinen/julkinen = Private/Public: ARS 95, Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki (1995); Ripple Across the Water, Watari Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (1995); Hybrids, De Appel, Amsterdam (1996); 10th Biennale of Sydney: Jurassic Technologies Revenant (1996); The Hugo Boss Prize: 1996, Guggenheim Museum Soho, New York (1996); De-Genderism, Setagaya Art Museum, Tokyo (1997); 4e Biennale d'art contemporain de Lyon: L'Autre (1997); Wounds: Between Democracy and Redemption in Contemporary Art, Moderna Museet, Stockholm (1998); Regarding Beauty: A View of the Late Twentieth Century, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. (1999); Carnegie International 1999/2000, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh (1999–2000); Voilà: Le monde dans la tête, Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (2000); media city Seoul 2000, Seoul Metropolitan Museum of Art (2000); and Public Offerings, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2001). Barney was awarded the Europa 2000 Prize at the 45th Biennale di Venezia in 1993; the Guggenheim Museum's 1996 Hugo Boss Prize; the Skowhegan Medal for Combined Media in 1999; the James D. Phelan Art Award in Video by the Bay Area Video Coalition, San Francisco, in 2000; and the Irish Museum of Modern Art Glen Dimplex Artists Award in 2001.