The winner of this year's Glen Dimplex Artists Award, worth £15,000, is an American, Matthew Barney. Once described by the New York Times as "the most important American artist of his generation," Barney was nominated for his series of Cremaster films, several of which have been screened in Meeting House Square, Temple Bar, Dublin.
Ironically, Barney was the only one of the four shortlisted artists not present at the awards ceremony at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Kilmainham, last night.
Barney was born in San Francisco, California, in 1967 and lives in New York. As a student at Yale he switched from medicine to arts, was on the college football team and worked as a fashion model. He announced his arrival on the art scene in 1991 with a video installation in which, naked save for a climbing harness, he worked his way up the wall and across the ceiling of New York's Barbara Gladstone Gallery.
He has devoted most of the last decade to his series of Cremaster films. Though these bizarre, surreal visual extravaganzas incorporate such apparently comprehensible subjects as the TT Races on the Isle of Man, and the execution of Gary Gilmore, they defy conventional analysis.
The title refers to the muscle that lifts or lowers the testes in the male body, and all of the films feature a fascination with sexual identity, and with a stage of development before sexual differentiation, often dramatising the inner workings of the human body.
While the core of Barney's work is contained in his films, each of them generates a host of related products, rather like the franchising that accompanies Hollywood blockbusters. His props become sculptures, and production stills, related drawings and books are exhibited and sold. The films are also released in limited-edition videos.
The other shortlisted artists were Richard Billingham, Elizabeth Magill and Susan Philipsz. Late last year two of the jurors, British curators Mark Francis and Jonathan Watkins, withdrew from the panel because, they said, they felt unable to continue while the position of the director of IMMA, Mr Declan McGonagle, was under threat. The remaining five jurors continued the adjudication process without them.
This year marks the end of Glen Dimplex's sponsorship of the award. In the eight years of its existence the scheme was one of the most significant arts sponsorships in the country.
