Gordon Matta-Clark

Gordon Matta-Clark, born in 1943 in New York, died in 1978 at the same place, was a conceptual artist best known for his so-called “building cuts” from the 1970s; a series of site-specific projects, involving the dissection of abandoned buildings. Matta-Clark received formal training as an architect at Cornell University from 1962 to 1968, including a year at the Sorbonne in Paris, where he studied French literature and met Guy Debord and the Situationist International. Matta-Clark never practiced architecture, but instead devised a theory of “anarchitecture,” an alternative use of buildings. The film and photographic material from his “building cuts” projects is combined with the experimental roughness of the architectural cuts, constituting a denunciation of the function of conventional architecture.

Throughout his lifetime the artist received numerous grants and awards including the Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship (1977) and the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship Theodoron (1975). Important solo exhibitions include the Paris Biennale (1975), the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (1977; 1978; 1985), the Stedelijk Museum (1986), the Museo Reina Sofía (1997; 2006), and the Whitney Museum of American Art (2007). Notable group exhibitions include MoMA (1971), Documenta (1972; 1977), MoMA P.S.1 (1976; 2015), Moderna Museet, SFMOMA (1993; 1999), Hamburger Kunsthalle (2000), Tate Modern (2005), the Musée National d’Art Modern in Paris (2005), and the Art Institute of Chicago (2016). His work is included in the public collections of the Canadian Center for Architecture, MoMA, Whitney Museum of American Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, SFMOMA, Stedelijk Museum, and Sammlung Verbund, Vienna.

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