![]() This record was set in 1999 just a few months before he received the Prix Europa 2000 for the best young artist. As a result, there are few cases of “quick resale” and Matthew Barney’s auction market is not particularly dense: over the last fifteen years only 255 of his works have been offered at auctions and only ten since the beginning of 2010… that is just one sixth of Jeff KOONS’ auction volume and 1/24 of Takashi MURAKAMI’s!īarney’s auction record is $350,000 for an installation created for Cremaster 4. Thus, Barney sells the accessories, photographs, drawings, installations and costumes that were used in making his films.Ĭollectors therefore invest by conviction and are not tempted to speculate. In additions he overturns the standard economic rules of Contemporary art by asking collectors to invest prior to the production of a work. ![]() In effect, Matthew Barney operates in much the same way as CHRISTO JEANNE-CLAUDE whose monumental projects are self-financed by the sale of peripheral objects that were used or contributed to the project. Then there is the question of the financing of the epic films and their extravagant decors and accessories. Ursula Andress participated in the adventure with a remarkable appearance in Cremaster 5. Matthew BARNEY’s artistic ambitions have been generously met by, for example, the New York Guggenheim Museum and the grand Opera in Budapest, both of which allowed him to film certain scenes of his film on their premises. These textless stories – with highly convoluted narrative threads – are full of metaphors and incursions into pagan mythologies and they conjure up all sorts of allegories and rites, with all kinds of references to art, technology, architecture, nature and pop culture. The Cremaster universe oscillates between dreams and nightmares and is populated by hermaphrodite creatures, mutants, hybrid beings fighting with their animality, and satyrs trying rites of passage. It invents a new mythology of the cycle of life and of spiritual evolution. The major project that really confirmed Barney’s status was in fact a cycle of five art films – seven hours in all – entitled Cremaster (named after the muscle linking the sperm duct to the testicles and the only ‘uncontrollable’ muscle since it only reacts to external stimuli) that he created between 19.Ĭremaster is a most unusual work in the field of Contemporary art. That kind of exposure put Barney on an art market fast track although, at the time, he hadn’t even started the work that made him one of the most important artists of his generation. Several months later, his work was exhibited in New York, then at the Venice Biennial and then at the Whitney Museum in 1993. His first solo exhibition dates back to 1991 at a Los Angeles gallery. A former top-level American Footballer, he first caught the attention of a small circle of American art fans through his performance art before developing a universe of significant theatrical intensity whose seductive and yet dissonant imagery has reinvented the place of film in Contemporary art. Matthew Barney is an unusual person, known to the general public mainly for being the partner of the Icelandic singer Björk.
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