CREMASTER 4 adheres most closely to the project's biological model. This penultimate episode describes the system's onward rush toward descension despite its resistance to division. The logo for this chapter is the Manx triskelion - three identical armored legs revolving around a central axis. Set on the Isle of Man, the film absorbs the island's folklore...

The film concerns the theme of self-imposed limitation and continues Matthew Barney's interest in religious rite, this time focusing on Shinto.

The latest installment in the monumental Drawing Restraint series, which merges sculpture, athleticism and cryptic symbolism into a stunning meditation on art-making and physical exertion.

How does artist Matthew Barney use 45,000 pounds of petroleum jelly, a factory whaling vessel and traditional Japanese rituals to create his latest art project? Barney plowed the waters off the coast of Nagasaki to film his massive endeavor, Drawing Restraint 9. The documentary Matthew Barney: No Restraint journeys to Japan with Barney and his collaborator Bjork, as the visual artist creates a "narrative sculpture" telling a fantastical love story of two characters that transform from land mammals into whales.

Secondary maps two different narratives onto each other, using movement as the formal through-line. The first describes the complex overlay of violence and spectacle inherent in American football, and more broadly within American culture. Barney’s personal involvement in the sport served as a starting point for the development of this project. The extreme physical and psychological conditions of the game have been abstracted in Barney’s art practice since his earliest work, and now provide a context for this subject that is both retrospective and a new, direct engagement.

Redoubt unfolds as a series of hunts in the wilderness of Idaho’s Sawtooth Mountains, led by Diana, a modern-day sharpshooter. The characters communicate a mythological narrative through dance, letting movement replace language as they pursue each other and their prey.

Visionary artist Matthew Barney returns to cinema with this 3-part epic, a radical reinvention of Norman Mailer’s novel Ancient Evenings. In collaboration with composer Jonathan Bepler, Barney combines traditional modes of narrative cinema with filmed elements of performance, sculpture, and opera, reconstructing Mailer’s hypersexual story of Egyptian gods and the seven stages of reincarnation, alongside the rise and fall of the American car industry.

CREMASTER 5 is a five-act opera (sung in Hungarian) set in late-ninteenth century Budapest. The last film in the series, it represents the moment when the testicles are finally released and sexual differentiation is fully attained. The lamenting tone of the opera suggests that Barney invisions this as a moment of tragedy and loss. The primary character is the Queen of Chain (played by Ursula Andress). Barney, himself, plays three characters who appear in the mind of the Queen: her Diva, Magician, and Giant. The Magician is a stand-in for Harry Houdini, who was born in Budapest in 1874 and appears as a recurring character in the Cremaster cycle.

American WWII soldiers open a mold, exposing a solid architectural structure made entirely of petroleum jelly. The soldiers violently soften the structure with shovels. The wall of a large metal box slams down revealing Douglas MacArthur (played by Matthew Barney) smoking a large corncob pipe. MacArthur wades through the petroleum jelly morass to a Japanese general wearing a top hat. Both generals sign several white plastic tablets with inkless tattoo guns. Over a bunsen burner, Barney heats up a branding iron bearing his insignia and presses it into each white tablet. After each tablet has been signed and branded, Barbara Gladstone, who attends in period attire, ceremonially places a sticker label bearing the work’s name, date, and Gladstone Gallery logo on each tablet.

For his five Cremaster films Matthew Barney's created a multitude of sculptural forms and structures. Recently both the sculptures and the films traveled to museums in Cologne, Paris and New York's Guggenheim. In THE CREMASTER CYCLE: A Conversation with Matthew Barney, the artist guides the camera through this remarkable creation at the Guggenheim Museum while being questioned by Michael Kimmelman, chief art critic of the New York Times.