Reorganizing Structure by Drawing Through it. Drawing by Gordon Matta-Clark

This first publication and catalogue raisonné of the innovative drawings and conceptual works by the American artist Gordon Matta-Clark (1943–1978 New York, US) is documenting some 800 artworks, almost his entire graphic oeuvre. It was published to accompany his exhibition at the Generali Foundation in Vienna (7 May–10 August 1997) that traveled in the following years to in Barcelona at the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA), to New York at the MoMA PS1, with a final stop in Münster, Germany, at the Westfälische Landesmuseum.

Matta-Clark, who became well known with his so-called “cut drawings”—transformations of buildings by means of cuts or extractions of segments—also created drawings throughout his entire career. Starting with his ecological concerns and the Land Art movement, Matta-Clark first drawings focused on trees. These formed architectures and gave way to pictographs, arrows, calligraphy and drawings involved with energy and movement.

With his so-called “cut drawings,” Matta-Clark established the cut in a stack of paper as a technique of drawing and sculpture. He called it “a way of drawing in the same way as one makes sculpture.” As a trained architect Matta-Clark conceived his major projects through drawings. “A simple cut or a series of cuts functions as a powerful drawing and redefines spatial situations and structural units,” claimed the artist. Some of his most interesting drawings are the so-called Sky Hooks (1978), proposals for “balloon buildings”, he made in the last year before his premature death. He aimed at creating non-hermetic architecture, which should revolve around the human body.