A central figure of the downtown New York art scene in the 1970s, 

 (1943–1978) 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.

In 1985, the first museum retrospective of Matta-Clark's work was presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and traveled until 1989 to over a dozen institutions internationally, including the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Kunsthalle Basel; Le Nouveau Musée, Villeurbanne, France; Brooklyn Museum, New York; and the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal. In 1997, the Generali Foundation, Vienna, prepared the first comprehensive overview dedicated to the artist's drawing practice, consisting of over six hundred works on paper. It toured through 2000 to the Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona; Institute for Art and Urban Resources at P.S. 1, New York; and the Westfälisches Landesmuseum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte, Münster, Germany.

 was the first full-scale retrospective organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, which traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. From 2009 to 2010, 

—the first major survey of his work in South America—toured to the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Santiago; Museu de Arte Moderna, São Paulo; Paco Imperial, Rio de Janeiro; and Museo de Arte de Lima. Recent institutional exhibitions were held at Museu Serralves, Porto(2017), and The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (2018), which marked the first full-scale retrospective of the artist’s work in Asia (titled 

). In 2017 to 2020, Matta-Clark’s work was the focus of a critically acclaimed traveling exhibition, 

, that was on view at The Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York; Jeu de Paume, Paris; Kumu Art Museum, Tallinn, Estonia; and the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts. Power Station of Art in Shanghai presented a solo exhibition of the artist’s work entitled 

Passing Through Architecture: The 10 Years of Gordon Matta-Clark

 was on view at the KØS Museum of Art in Public Spaces, Køge, Denmark, in 2020. 

was on view at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg, Austria, in 2021 to 2022.

Since 1998, the Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark has been represented by David Zwirner. Previous solo exhibitions at the gallery in New York include 

Gordon Matta-Clark and Rirkrit Tiravanija

112 Greene Street: The Early Years (1970–1974)

 was presented at David Zwirner, New York, which united a group of works by Matta-Clark and others shown at 112 Greene Street in SoHo, one of New York's first alternative, artist-run venues. Organized by Jessamyn Fiore, an independent curator, writer, and co-director of the Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark with her mother Jane Crawford, the exhibition led to the critically acclaimed, eponymous catalogue, published in 2012 by David Zwirner and Radius Books. In 2018, 

 marked the artist’s seventh solo show with David Zwirner and his first at the gallery’s London location. In 2023, 52 Walker, New York, organized the two-person presentation 

Gordon Matta-Clark & Pope.L: Impossible Failures.

Matta-Clark’s work is represented in prominent public collections, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; 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, and includes the artist's personal correspondence, notebooks, drawings, photographs, slides, films, as well as other archival material documenting his life and work.

Antonio Sergio Bessa

Jessamyn Fiore

Texts by Antonio Sergio Bessa and Jessamyn Fiore

"Undoing is just as much a democratic right as doing." — Gordon Matta-Clark

This revealing book looks at the groundbreaking work of Gordon Matta-Clark, whose socially conscious practice blurred the boundaries between contemporary art and architecture. After completing a degree in architecture at Cornell University, Matta-Clark returned to his home city of New York. There he employed the term “anarchitecture,” combining “anarchy” and “architecture,” to describe the site-specific works he initially realized in the South Bronx.

The borough’s many abandoned buildings, the result of economic decline and middle-class flight, served as Matta-Clark’s raw material. His series 

 dissected these structures, performing an anatomical study of the ravaged urban landscape. Moving from New York to Paris with 

, a piece that became emblematic of artistic protest, Matta-Clark applied this same method to a pair of seventeenth-century row houses slated for demolition as a result of the Centre Pompidou’s construction. This compelling volume grounds Matta-Clark’s practice against the framework of architectural and urban history, stressing his pioneering activist-inspired approach, as well as his contribution to the nascent fields of social practice and relational aesthetics.

Gordon Matta-Clark: Anarchitect

Gordon Matta-Clark: Anarchitect | Books

David Zwirner is an art gallery with locations in New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris and Hong Kong. We present physical and online exhibitions, podcasts, books, and more.