Gordon Matta-Clark

@ Galerie La Patinoire Royale Bach presents Gordon Matta-Clark, the first major solo exhibition of the renowned American artist in Belgium in over thirty years.

Gordon Matta-Clark was intensely political. When he sawed a house in half (Splitting, 1974), he was commenting on the dissolution of the American family. When he cut a hole through the floor of a Bronx tenement, he was calling attention to society’s failure to provide adequate housing. But the social commentary alone didn’t make him one of a small number of artists whose work has had a profound impact on architecture. (Others in that pantheon include Donald Judd and James Turrell.) That impact, which continues 40 years after Matta-Clark’s death, can be traced to his trademark approach to the built environment, in which walls, floors, and ceilings were not sacrosanct, but subjects of destructive investigation. Matta-Clark, the son of artists Roberto Matta and Anna Louise Clark, studied architecture at Cornell in the late 1960s, a period of dissolution, disillusionment, and protest. After graduating in 1968 he returned to his native New York City and began not to build but to respond to existing buildings. In the Bronx, Matta-Clark began sawing holes through the floors of tenements; the borough’s derelict housing was his raw material. The architect whose work bears the greatest resemblance to Matta-Clark may be Steven Holl, whose buildings often appear to be carved out, rather than constructed. Indeed, the removal of spherical volumes from a rectangular solid (the genesis of Holl’s experimental Ex of In House in Rhinebeck, New York) is a cousin of one of Matta-Clark’s most famous pieces, called Conical Intersect. Created for the Paris Biennial in 1975, it consisted of a cone hollowed out of two derelict 17th-century buildings near the site of the Pompidou Center. Rem Koolhaas, too, has Matta-Clark instincts. Chosen to build a student center alongside a Mies van der Rohe building in Chicago, Koolhaas exposed the foundation of Mies’s building, something the perfectionist Mies never intended to display, and showcased it behind a picture window. Matta-Clark died at 35. There is no telling what he would have achieved as an artist if he had lived. And there is no telling what he might have achieved as an architect, had he chosen to pursue that path. LINK Galerie La Patinoire Royale Bach