Gordon Matta-Clark was an American artist and architect known for his large-scale projects. Dealing with themes of metamorphosis and resistance towards the commodification of art, Matta-Clark produced interventions in architectural structures he called “anarchitecture.” The most famous of these was Splitting (1974), an intervention in which the artist sawed out a gaping vertical segment from the middle of a wood-frame house in suburban New Jersey. “By undoing a building [I] open a state of enclosure which has been preconditioned not only by physical necessity but by the industry that proliferates suburban and urban boxes as a pretext for ensuring a passive, isolated consumer,” he once explained. Born on June 22, 1943 in New York, NY, his father was the artist Roberto Matta and his godmother was Marcel Duchamp’s wife Teeny Duchamp. He went on to study architecture at Cornell University from 1963 to 1968, where he met Robert Smithson who along with Dennis Oppenheim influenced his interest in using non-art materials. Moving back to New York, Matta-Clark experimented with both food and photography as well as documenting the burgeoning graffiti-scene and the sewers and subways of the city. The artist tragically died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 35 on August 27, 1978 in New York, NY. Today, his works are held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, and the Reina Sofia National Museum in Madrid, among others.