BRAFA | BOOTH 47

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.

 At BRAFA, we feature a special section dedicated to Office Baroque (1977), one of Matta-Clark’s last interventions, created in Belgium a year before his untimely death in 1978 at age 35. The artist produced a complex geometrically layered three dimensional series of cuts derived from patterns of overlapping circles which systematically arched through the five floors of an office building in Antwerp. 

The booth also includes rare collages from his landmark series Splitting (1974) and Conical Intersect (1975), that translate his architectural cuts into meticulous, layered photographic compositions, embodying his concept of “anarchitecture.” His photo-collages encapsulate his vision of exposing hidden layers within neglected urban environments, creating haunting, multidimensional perspectives that echo through contemporary art.

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. Matta-Clark’s work is represented in prominent public collections, including The Metropolitan Museum, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, MoMA, and many others. 

Vasconcelos has exhibited three times at the Venice Biennale, including representing Portugal in 2013. In 2012 she was the first woman and youngest artist to exhibit at the Palace of Versailles, with an exhibition that drew a record 1.6 million visitors. She has had solo exhibitions at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, The Grand Palais in Paris, Palazzo Grassi in Venice and many others. She is the guest of honor at BRAFA 2025.

Lita Albuquerque is a major figure in the Land Art and Light & Space Movements. She was born in 1946 in Santa Monica, California and spent her childhood in Tunisia, Paris and the US. Albuquerque emerged on the Californian artistic scene through the Light and Space movement. At the end of the 1970s, she gained international recognition for her ephemeral Land Art installations. Through colored pigments in natural landscapes, she questions cartography, identity and the cosmos. The artist is interested in our place in the immensity of infinite space and eternal time.

Among her major recent exhibitions are the Light and Space retrospective at Copenhagen Contemporary Denmark (2021), Groundswell: Women of Land Art, at the Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, Texas, USA (2023), and the Venice Biennale.

Her works are held in numerous major collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Getty Trust, the Whitney Museum of American Art, LACMA and MOCA.

French artist Renaud Auguste-Dormeuil, born in 1968, has been exploring and critiquing the dynamics of unilateral power and the subjectivity of perspective in his work since the 1990s. 

Here we present Tapisserie dite de la panthère (2024), from his series of Aubusson tapestries titled Hope It Was Worth It. Each piece is associated with a historical event from the time it was woven, transforming these works into palimpsests in which the history of art merges with the history of mankind.

Carlos Cruz-Diez was a French artist of Venezuelan origin. He was born in Caracas in 1923 and died in Paris in 2019. Since the sixties, he lived and worked in Paris.

Carlos Cruz-Diez is a major artist in the optical and kinetic art movement, which claims "the realization of the instability of reality".  Cruz-Diez's extensive research made him into a key thinker of colour in the 20th century. The artist conceived the chromatic phenomena as an autonomous reality, evolving independently in space and time in a continuous present.

At BRAFA, the gallery presents one of Cruz-Diez' renowned Physichromie works, where were structures designed to reveal certain circumstances and conditions related to color, changing according to the movement of the viewer and the intensity of the light, and thus projecting color into space to create an evolutionary situation of additive, reflective, and subtractive color.

Thomas Devaux's work centers on an ensemble entitled Cet Obscur Objet du Désir (Obscure Object of Desire), divided into series of photographs including The Shoppers, Dichroics and his Totems. Through these works, he questions the new transcendences of the contemporary world. Like a surveillance system, the Shoppers series captures from afar the consumer's movements as they shop or stroll with their shopping bags.  "In almost zombified attitudes, the Shopper is treated visually as a bleeding-edge figure, anonymous yet singular, " according to Michel Poivert.

The mirror-work Dichroics reflects the viewer thanks to the choice of the eponymous style of glass that enables a double luminous operation (light passes through the glass but is also reflected in it). Blinding the viewer, this gold-leaf-framed work encourages the spectator to satisfy any cravings for selfies, surrounded by the other works in the exhibition. Cet Obscur Objet du Désir (This Obscure Object of Desire) appears as a plastic fable through which the public can become aware of its own consumption.

Michel Mouffe was born in 1957 in Brussels, Belgium. Mouffe’s paintings can be described as sculpture-canvas. At first glance, the canvas may appear monochromatic; however, it is covered by multiple layers of varying colours. This process produces a radiant painting, almost a satin finish. Patience is a significant part of Mouffe’s creative process. The patience is transmitted to the observer through a call for meditation. The metal backbone that emerges from the back of the canvas gives it an organic appearance, bringing it alive.