Out of the Box: Gordon Matta-Clark

Gordon Matta-Clark (1943–1978, New York, NY, US) was one of the most important figures in the New York art scene of the late 1960s and the 1970s. In just under ten years, he was able to develop a dense and wide-ranging body of work in which he advocated a new understanding of art as social practice. The significance of his “Building Cuts,” in which he opened spatial structures employing forceful interventions, cutting through and dissecting entire buildings, became widely recognized.

Matta-Clark’s objective of transforming accepted notions of architecture occupies a central position in his work. In his radical interventions, which he implemented in such cities as New York, Paris, and Antwerp, the artist, a trained architect, was creating new ways of addressing problematic areas of the urban architecture of his time. A counter-position to the poor quality of life provided by purely functionalist architecture, an urban development economy that regards architecture as a series of containers and cells, as well as speculation, gentrification, and social exclusion. Matta-Clark’s legendary deconstructions, but also his collectively operated restaurant Food, his performances organized as social spaces, and his profound interest in ecological issues still provide a source of inspiration for artists and architects working today.

The exhibition offered new insights into Matta-Clark’s artistic thinking. It drew on the extensive collections and archives at the Canadian Center for Architecture (CCA) in Montreal and the Generali Foundation. For the first time in Europe, the exhibition was presenting a research and exhibition series on Matta-Clark in three parts, organized by the CCA in 2019–20. The curators Yann Chateigné, Hila Peleg, and Kitty Scott immersed themselves in deeply informative archival material such as personal correspondence, sketchbooks, unseen film footage, private photographs, and Matta-Clark’s library.

In the spirit of a dialogue between the collections, the Generali Foundation invited the artist Hans Schabus to work with its Matta-Clark archive and collection. In the exhibition, a selection of important archival materials—in connection with central works from both collections—was made accessible for the first time.