Matthew Barney is an American avant-garde artist/director, born in San Francisco in 1967, a new generation of Artists who became popular in the United States in the late 1990s and now lives in New York. Matthew Barney is a master of fantasy and fabrication, which is reflected in his mixed installations, performance art photographs, and unique video works. Artistic makeup, gorgeously dressed models, synthetic substances that are difficult to determine shapes, greasy objects made of vaseline, roaring racing cars, and horned pornographers.
His artistic career began at barbara gladstone Gallery in New York and was soon successful. Since 1990, he has participated in almost all the major international art exhibitions in the world, and in 1996 won the Guggenheim Museum Contemporary Art Prize. From 1994 to 2002, Barney created a five-part art film, Suspense / Occultity and Death.
His experimental film Drawingrestraint9 was featured at last year's Venice Film Festival, starring his wife, Björk. In fact, in the 1990s, he has already appeared in major exhibitions around the world, the 45th Venice Biennale, the 92nd Documenta in Kassel, the 10th Sydney Biennale and so on. In 1996, he received the Hugo Award from the Guggenheim Museum in New York.
Matthew Barney was one of the most dynamic artists in the United States in the nineties
His work mixes the linguistic forms of performance, photography, video, installation and film, and his work is generally styled by extremely beautiful, funky visual compositions and tones, making him another genius in the use of trendy vision after Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons. But compared to his predecessors, Matthew Barney's vision has an extra layer of mythology. In his numerous works, he made extensive use of various artistic media means, but the most representative is his short film series "Hanging Silk" that he began shooting in 1994. The best three were Suspension 4 (1994), Suspension 1 (1995/96), and Suspension 5 (1997). The short film series is about half an hour each episode, and there is no complete story and dialogue, only some grotesque plot pieces, imagery, sounds, and imaginary makeup, props, scenes, and character styling.
He is involved in almost all means of expression that exist in modern art
At the end of 2002, the cremaster series 1-5, in the Estele d'Art Moderne in Paris, was a review of the work of Matthew Barney in the past decade, and he began to enter the ranks of artists who used the human body as a form of artistic expression from 1994, and it was not until 2002 that he ended the creation of these 5 films (I don't know what to call this kind of art until now, there is no accurate translation in China, let's translate it literally, called body art). The 5 films were just part of the exhibition, which caused quite a stir in Europe at the time. At that time, my feeling was that his works involved many fields, film, sculpture, video, painting, photography, dance, behavior, costumes, performances and even medicine, prosthetics, psychopathology and other fields, in a word, almost all the means of expression that exist in modern art, he was involved, and did a good combination and use. You will feel that high-tech has a great influence on art, and the other is that without strong financial support, you cannot complete works like this. Matthew Barney became the darling of modern art in the world.
A representative tendency of international contemporary art in the late nineties
Matthew Barney depicts a kind of imaginary suffering that is not like the specific enemies of the early days of capitalism: capitalists, commodities, machines, and money. Now, these symbols are no longer ethically difficult to clearly criticize. Everything causes suffering, but everything cannot find the source of suffering. Moreover, in the contemporary era of globalization, this suffering is accompanied by beautiful visual consumer culture and the sensory comfort of the body.
Matthew Barney's work reflects a representative tendency of international contemporary art in the late nineties: fashionable and beautiful tones, fictional visual images, and schizophrenic expressive content. It shows that individuals are deeply influenced by consumer culture, the international capitalist system and the virtual information society in the era of global capitalism