Kumu Art Museum, Tallinn, Estonia
February 2019
February 22–June 8, 2019
Gordon Matta-Clark: Anarchitecttraveled to Kumu Art Museum in Tallinn following presentations at Jeu de Paume in Paris and The Bronx Museum of the Arts, where its debut showing in 2017 drew critical acclaim.
Featuring more than one hundred works as well as film projections and rarely seen materials from the artist’s archive, this major survey has been organized by Antonio Sergio Bessa at The Bronx Museum with Jessamyn Fiore, co-director of the Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark. In her review of Anarchitect for The New York Times, Roberta Smith praised this "beautifully staged, streamlined version of the artist’s career [that] still conveys a full picture of his radical sensibility." An accompanying catalogue includes texts by the exhibition’s curators that contextualize Matta-Clark’s practice within the framework of architectural and urban history. Anarchitect will travel to the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts later in 2019.
Matta-Clark is considered one of the most influential postwar artists. His radical methods of subverting architecture and the urban landscape began with a series of "cuts" he produced in the Bronx borough in New York in the early 1970s. Some of his best-known projects involved laboriously cutting holes in the floors or walls of abandoned or soon-to-be-demolished buildings or, as with Splitting (1974), slicing a house in two. As Martin Filler writes in The New York Review of Books Daily,"Matta-Clark’s audacious hybridization and redefinition of three mediums—architecture, sculpture, and painting—opened new modes of contemporary expression."
On view at David Zwirner in London through December 20, 2018, Gordon Matta-Clark: Works 1970–1978 included 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.
Image: Gordon Matta-Clark, Day’s End, 1975. © The Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark. Courtesy The Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark.