Matthew Barney is often called a rock star of the art world, journalistic shorthand for his international celebrity. (The New York Times has dubbed him the most important artist of his generation.) Setting aside his crew of roadies, and his child with a real rock star, the Icelandic singer Bjork, the sobriquet can be misleading. Far from fitting a single Billboard demographic, Barney’s fan base is as diverse as his work, which combines drawing, sculpture, film, video, photography, and performance, all intermixed as resonantly as the instruments in a well-tuned orchestra. Creating work that’s instantly recognizable yet utterly personal, the inimitable Barney, 39, isn’t so much a rock star as a one-man genre.

His latest work, the two-and-a-half-hour feature film Drawing Restraint 9, started showing in Bay Area theaters in mid-May, but to fully appreciate the richly layered imagery underlying its faint trace of storyline takes an excursion to SFMOMA, where an entire floor has been given over to 150 drawings, sculptures, photographs, and films selected and installed by Barney himself. Some of the works relate directly to objects and motifs in the film (screening daily at the museum), which is essentially the love story of two travelers in a strange land, shot in Japan on an enormous factory whaling ship, starring Barney and Bjork, who also composed the sound track. Other items in this wonderfully bizarre exhibition, from earlier phases in Barney’s 19-year-long Drawing Restraint series, may be more perplexing without a little personal history.

During his childhood, in San Francisco and then in Boise, Idaho, Barney expressed himself athletically. In high school he played football. Later, at Yale, he studied medicine, paying his tuition by modeling for J. Crew and Ralph Lauren. All three of these activities involve the body, and it was with his body that Barney began his artistic career while still at Yale. To be specific, he strapped himself into an elastic tether and, straining against the tension, strove to make drawings on his studio wall. Another exercise had him jumping on a trampoline, with each leap adding a stroke to a self-portrait on the ceiling. To draw on the floor, he attached a pencil to a blocking sled (a weighted barrier used in football training to simulate an opposing player) and plowed it forward with all his might.

The tethers and blocking sled were more than exotic trappings. Playing football, Barney had learned about a phenomenon for which premed gave him the terminology: hypertrophy, the process by which muscles bulk up in response to exercise. He speculated that hypertrophy could apply to artistic as well as physical endeavors, not only literally—the physical difficulty of making the drawings adding to their power—but also metaphorically. Driving a blocking sled forward can symbolize the creative process itself, as well as the paradox that restraint often strengthens an artwork, in the same way that the constraints of rhyme can invigorate a sonnet.

Following this insight, Barney started turning athletic equipment into sculpture. He created one of his earliest sculptures by covering a weight bench with petroleum jelly, a translucent all-purpose athletic lubricant that looks as slick as it feels. You can imagine putting your hands in it, getting a palpable sense of his creative process just by viewing the piece.

At the same time, Barney was abstracting exertion into performance, turning the creative struggle over to characters enacting a narrative on videotape or film. This is where the background in fashion modeling comes in: Barney has an unsurpassed ability to evoke baroque fantasy with stylized gestures. It’s here, also, that his art becomes more than a formal exploration of artistic practice and begins to exhibit its own compelling, peculiar logic.

Those familiar with the Cremaster cycle, the epic series of five films that made Barney famous in the late ’90s, have encountered this aspect of his work. Cremaster chronicles the weeks leading up to sexual differentiation in the human embryo, a process even more fundamental than hypertrophy. In these films, Barney shuns conventional imagery such as sonograms and x-rays. His spectacularly byzantine account uses a more personal cosmogony involving bagpipes, Goodyear blimps, the Chrysler Building, satyrs, and Harry Houdini as played by an arthritic Norman Mailer, to name but a few of the more identifiable elements. The films—which contain some of the most uncanny and memorable visuals since the height of surrealism, such as a race among dead horses during which the stallions’ flayed flesh falls away like excess baggage—have attracted a fanatical following. Cremaster is Barney’s perfectly self-contained masterpiece and, once you give yourself over to it, one of the most moving artworks in years.

What’s the appeal? Imagine looking in on another person’s dreams—the reveries of Kafka, say, or of Borges. Almost unfathomably dense with imagery, as palpable yet as unfamiliar as a weight bench covered in petroleum jelly, Barney’s dreamscapes invite spectators to attach personal meanings to the transformations his richly costumed characters and oddly constructed objects undergo.

Drawing Restraint, on the other hand, is the ever-unfolding work in progress through which Barney’s entire opus (including the Cremaster series, which is not part of this exhibition) can be grasped. He didn’t work on Drawing Restraint for most of the decade he devoted to Cremaster, but now he’s returned to it with greater dedication than before, and more petroleum jelly as well: the whaling ship in Drawing Restraint 9 carries a sculpture made from 25 tons of hot Vaseline, which gradually engulfs Barney and Bjork at the consummation of their romance, facilitating their transformation into whales last seen swimming through a field of icebergs toward the open sea. (Such literal descriptions of Barney’s work, of course, can barely describe it. You really have to see it for yourself.)

While visually dazzling, Drawing Restraint 9 is not as fully realized an artwork as Cremaster, and Barney himself provides the reason. “I went to Japan and realized it wasn’t possible for me to make a piece where my language would be viral to the environment,” he says. “I had to be a guest, to let the community be what it is.” At its best, the result is a stunning stylistic juxtaposition of East and West. The new work brings him full circle, only this time the resistance to his creative effort isn’t a tether or a blocking sled. Drawing Restraint 9 reflects the struggle of Barney’s prodigious imagination against whaling and this regimented society that still pursues it. If the principle of hypertrophy holds true and creativity is indeed nurtured by constraint, Matthew Barney is now poised to climb from rock star to maestro.

Matthew Barney: Drawing Restraint, June 23–Sept. 17, SFMOMA, 151 Third St., S.F., 415-357-4000