Matthew Barney valuation
The Cremaster Cycle, petroleum jelly, and sculpture that will not sit still in a warehouse.
Matthew Barney was born in San Francisco in 1967, was a college football player at Yale, and came to attention in the early 1990s with performances involving climbing harnesses and physical restraint.
What a work by Matthew Barney is worth
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation is free, made online from the photographs you send, and it commits you to nothing. We act for sellers across the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States.
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Bio
Matthew Barney was born in San Francisco in 1967, was a college football player at Yale, and came to attention in the early 1990s with performances involving climbing harnesses and physical restraint. The Cremaster Cycle, five feature-length films made out of order between 1994 and 2002, is the central work: an invented private mythology with its own biology, staged everywhere from the Isle of Man to the Chrysler Building, accompanied by sculptures, drawings and vitrines drawn from the films. Later projects include Drawing Restraint, River of Fundament and Redoubt. He has worked in self-lubricating plastic, cast petroleum jelly, tapioca and thermoplastic.
This is a market where the physical vulnerability of the object is unusually important. Barney's signature materials are unstable by design — petroleum jelly slumps, plastics yellow, cast biological materials degrade — and a work's condition, storage history and any conservation record bear directly on what it can achieve. Editions of the films exist with their vitrines and are sold as complete installations, so the components list matters. The drawings, often in graphite on paper in self-made frames, are the most straightforward part of the output and are usually unique.
Drawing Restraint, and the gallery
Drawing Restraint began in 1987 as studio experiments in drawing while physically restrained, and grew into larger projects: Drawing Restraint 8, ten vitrines of drawings, was shown at the Venice Biennale in 2003, and Drawing Restraint 9 in 2005 was a feature film with a soundtrack by Björk, with sculptures, photographs and drawings. River of Fundament, made between 2006 and 2014, is a three-act opera loosely based on Norman Mailer's novel Ancient Evenings.
Each drawing, sculpture and vitrine belongs to a named project and episode, and that title, with Gladstone Gallery's documentation, is what places a work.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
