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Gordon Matta-Clark is an American artist born in New York in 1943, who worked in performance, photography, film, and drawing. He is best known for his large-scale interventions on existing architecture, frequently made by cuts and removals. He studied architecture at Cornell University from 1963 to 1968. He then moved back to New York where, in 1971, he co-founded FOOD, a restaurant in SoHo managed and staffed by artists, which he ran until 1973. His first large-scale project was Splitting (1974), a house that he cut in two parts in Englewood, New Jersey. In 2019, Splitting was cited by the New York Times as one of the twenty-five works of art that defined the contemporary age. In 1975, he created Day’s End (1975) by making a series of cuttings on a Manhattan pier shed. That same year, he produced Conical Intersect by drilling a large cone-shaped hole through two seventeenth-century townhouses scheduled for demolition in the Halles district of Paris. In 1977 he filmed and photographed tunnels, sewers, and catacombs in New York and Paris. For his final major project, Circus or The Caribbean Orange (1978), he made circle cuts in the walls and floors of a townhouse next to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. He died at age 35 in 1978.
Matta-Clark’s work is represented in prominent public collections, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen, Antwerp; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. The Gordon Matta-Clark Archive is held at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal. The Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark is represented by David Zwirner.