Image: Gordon Matta-Clark creating Garbage Wallunder the Brooklyn Bridge in 1970. © The Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark 

David Zwirner is pleased to present an exhibition of works dating from 1970 to 1978 by Gordon Matta-Clark (1943–1978). Spanning three floors of the London gallery, the exhibition will include key examples from the artist’s short but prolific career, including films, photographs, sculptures, and works on paper that illustrate his complex engagement with architecture and the many ways in which he reconfigured the spaces and materials of everyday life. 

A central figure of the downtown New York art scene in the 1970s, Matta-Clark pioneered a radical approach to art making that directly engaged the urban environment and the communities within it. Through his many projects—including large-scale architectural interventions in which he physically cut through buildings slated for demolition—Matta-Clark developed a singular and prodigious oeuvre that critically examined the structures of the built environment. With actions and experimentations across a wide range of media, his work transcended the genres of performance, conceptual, process, and land art, making him one of the most innovative and influential artists of his generation. As Roberta Smith notes, Matta-Clark ‘used his skills to reshape and transform architecture into an art of structural explication and spatial revelation.’1 

This exhibition marks the first solo presentation of the artist’s work in London in over a decade and follows the recent institutional exhibitions SPLITTING, CUTTING, WRITING, DRAWING, EATING . . . GORDON MATTA-CLARK at Museu Serralves, Porto, Portugal (2017), and Gordon Matta-Clark: Mutation in Space at The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (2018). The artist’s work is currently the focus of a critically acclaimed travelling exhibition, Gordon Matta-Clark: Anarchitect, that was recently on view at The Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York, and Jeu de Paume, Paris. Anarchitect continues in 2019 at the Kumu Art Museum, Tallinn, Estonia, and Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts. 

1Roberta Smith, ‘Back in the Bronx: Gordon Matta-Clark, Rogue Sculptor', The New York Times(January 11, 2018), accessed online.