Matthew Barney
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. 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.
If you own a work by Matthew Barney
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