Matthew Barney might be The Most Interesting Man in the World. He played on the football and wrestling teams in high school, nursed ambitions to be a plastic surgeon, modelled for J Crew, became a leading avant-garde artist, spent more than a decade in a relationship with the Icelandic singer-songwriter Björk and set up a giant clock outside his studio to count down the first Donald Trump US presidency.
No one explores the violence in America’s source code quite like Barney, who since the 1990s has mounted a series of epic projects exploring the subject via references to classical mythology, modern history, sport, human anatomy and popular culture.
