GORDON MATTA-CLARK USA, 1943-1978

Gordon Matta-Clark (1943-1978) was a seminal figure in the downtown New York art scene in the 1970s with a storied practice that drew on his architectural education and traversed the genres of performance, conceptual, process, and land art, and laid the groundwork for social sculpture and social praxis as art making practice. 

Matta-Clark is best known for his ephemeral interventions in buildings slated for demolition. He physically deconstructed the spaces — cutting homes in half, extracting sections of the floor, and creating building-scale sculptures as he activated abandoned spaces through a unique practice of reduction and negation. In a practice of “anarchitecture” and with an eye toward what he termed “non-uments” he sawed through walls, transmuting vacant homes and warehouses into cathedrals and immersive installations with a poetic and creative relation to degeneration.

Matta-Clark’s work is represented in prominent public collections, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen, Antwerp; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Matta-Clark has been the subject of major retrospectives at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; The Whitney Museum, New York; Jeu de Paume, Paris and the subject of countless other major exhibitions.