Matthew Barney

American contemporary artist and film director who works in the fields of sculpture, film, photography and drawing. His works explore connections among geography, biology, geology and mythology as well as themes of conflict and failure. His early pieces were sculptural installations combined with performance and video.

Between 1994 and 2002, he created The Cremaster Cycle, a series of five films described by Jonathan Jones in The Guardian as "one of the most imaginative and brilliant achievements in the history of avant-garde cinema." He is also known for his projects Drawing Restraint 9 (2005), River of Fundament (2014), and Redoubt (2018).

Barney was born as the younger of two children in San Francisco, California, where he lived until he was 7. He lived in Boise, Idaho from 1973 to 1985, where his father got a job administering a catering service at Boise State University and where he attended elementary, middle, and high school. His parents divorced and his mother, an abstract painter, moved to New York City, where he would frequently visit. It was there where he was first introduced to the art scene. Barney was recruited by Yale University in 1985 to play football and planned to go into pre-med, but he also intended to study art. In 1989, he graduated from Yale. His earliest works, created at Yale, were staged at the university's Payne Whitney Gymnasium. In the 1990s Barney moved to New York, where he worked as a catalogue model, a career that helped him finance his early work as an artist.

In 2002, Barney had a daughter, Isadora Barney, with his then partner, the singer Björk, with whom he lived in a penthouse co-op in Brooklyn Heights. By September 2013, Barney and Björk were no longer a couple. At the time, she described the breakup as "the most painful thing" that she had ever experienced. Björk chronicled the breakup in her 2015 album Vulnicura and in particular in the track "Black Lake".