Gordon Matta-Clark

Marking the beginning of its tenth season this autumn, Galerie La Patinoire Royale Bach is pleased to present Gordon Matta-Clark, the first major solo exhibition of the renowned American artist in Belgium in three decades, with the preview opening September 19.

With a focus on Matta-Clark’s canonical building-cut architectural interventions, the exhibition presents a large selection of collages, photographs, films, and books the artist made around Bronx Floors (1972), Walls (1972), Splitting (1974), Bingo (1974), Conical Intersect (1975), and Office Baroque (1977). The artworks dialogue with an immersive large-scale installation of Matta-Clark’s film works in the gallery’s soaring nave. Curated by Julien Frydman, the show at La Patinoire Royale Bach pays tribute to an artist whose innovative, genre-busting practice, which literally opened spaces and brashly reoriented perspectives in the environments he found himself, has rippled through subsequent generations of artists and is more relevant than ever.

Gordon Matta-Clark (1943–78) 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. 

A leader in his artistic community, he continuously created interventions and exhibitions in dialogue with the avant-garde creatives scattered throughout SoHo lofts. He highlighted the social issues in the city that surrounded him by engaging directly with the locales and people. His work marries minute architecturally detailed planning and precise incisions with execution by sledgehammer and chainsaw to create something entirely unexpected—often meditative and sublime—out of mundane and neglected spaces. His process of splicing reality to liberate perspective resonates across the building cuts themselves and his image based practices. 

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. 

Throughout his practice, photography and film were essential modes of documentation and artmaking in themselves, through which he explored some of the major ideas underpinning his practice. The gallery selection focuses on the artist’s image based practices and includes never-exhibited works from the Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark, along with works that have been shown in the major retrospectives devoted to the artist at the Whitney Museum, The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, The Getty Center and Jeu de Paume.    

The exhibition is made possible with the support of The Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark in collaboration with David Zwirner Gallery and Montrasio Arte in Milan.