Gordon Matta Clark
dal 21/2/2007 al 6/6/2007
Segnalato da
21/2/2007
Gordon Matta Clark
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
You Are the Measure. This retrospective will bring together the breadth of his practice to reveal the unique beauty and radical nature of his punnings, plans, performances, and interventions evident in the many media in which he worked: the sculptural objects, drawings, fims, photographs, notebooks, and documentary material. "Matta-Clark's engagement as an artist was integral with his ideas of community" notes curator Elisabeth Sussman.
You Are the Measure
curated by Elisabeth Sussman and Sondra Gilman
The first full-scale retrospective in twenty years of the work of Gordon Matta-Clark will open at the
Whitney Museum of American Art on February 22, 2007. Gordon Matta-Clark: “You Are the
Measure” – which travels subsequently to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles – includes
Matta-Clark’s major works and presents numerous projects. The exhibition's curator is Elisabeth
Sussman, Curator and Sondra Gilman Curator of Photography at the Whitney.
During the brief but highly productive decade that he worked as an artist -- and even more so since
his early death -- Gordon Matta-Clark (1943-1978) has exerted a powerful influence on artists
and architects and has emerged as a key figure of the generation that came after Minimalism. This
retrospective celebrates the brilliance and radical nature of his work in a number of different
mediums: the sculptural objects (most notably from building cuts), drawings, films, photographs,
notebooks and documentary material.
"Matta-Clark's engagement as an artist was integral with his ideas of community,” notes curator
Elisabeth Sussman. “As a founder and participant in the earliest performance spaces and an
originator of the now-famed artist’s restaurant, Food, he was a pioneer in the transformation of
lower New York into the artist's neighborhood SoHo. His extraordinary career also developed in an
international context. His major cuts in buildings in Europe in Genoa, Antwerp, and Paris were truly
memorable as events and as unforgettable spatial experiences, as were his comparable projects in
New York and its environs: on the Hudson piers, in tenements, beneath the city’s bridges, streets,
and in suburban New Jersey."
The son of the Surrealist painter Roberto Echaurren Matta (1911-2002), Gordon Matta-Clark was
educated as an architect at Cornell, but was drawn away from the formal practice of architecture
and attracted to art, with all its expanded possibilities. At Cornell, in 1969, Matta-Clark assisted
on the path-breaking Earth Art exhibition that brought together a number of seminal figures,
including Robert Smithson.
His move to New York City quickly focused his attention on the particularities of the urban context
and on his own concrete spatial, social, and psychological experience. By the early years of the
1970s, Matta-Clark had come to see buildings, rooms, urban spaces, neighborhoods, and places
where people gather as situations in which his planned interventions could create something new.
His most well-known interventions were his cuts into existing buildings, resulting in incisions which
shifted everyday experience into extraordinary visual and kinetic confrontations. His work ensued
as a series of projects that included interactions with architecture and space, community events,
and collective activity.
The Whitney Museum of American Art is the leading advocate of 20 - and 21 -century American
art. Founded in 1930, the Museum is regarded as the preeminent collection of American art and
includes major works and materials from the estate of Edward Hopper, the largest public collection
of works by Alexander Calder, Louise Nevelson, and Lucas Samaras, as well as significant works by
Jasper Johns, Donald Judd, Agnes Martin, Bruce Nauman, Georgia O'Keeffe, Claes Oldenburg, Kiki
Smith, and Andy Warhol, among other artists. With its history of exhibiting the most promising and
influential American artists and provoking intense debate, the Whitney's signature show, the
Biennial, has become the most important survey of the state of contemporary art in America today.
Image: Gordon Matta-Clark working on Splitting, 1974, Englewood, New Jersey. Courtesy the Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark and David Zwirner, New York.
The Whitney Museum is located at 945 Madison Avenue, New York City. Museum hours are: Wednesday, Thursday,
Saturday, and Sunday from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., Friday from 1 p.m. to 9 p.m., closed Monday and Tuesday.