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

This first comprehensive exhibition of the innovative drawings and conceptual works by the American artist Gordon Matta-Clark (1943–1978 New York, US) was presenting some 600 artworks, almost his entire oeuvre, which became accessible on a large scale for the first time. 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. While his early drawings were presented in the large hall in the energy-charged abundance, sketches, plans, photographs, and objects from his projects formed a retrospective in the small exhibition hall.

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.

For his process-based and mostly non-conservable works, Matta-Clark also used photography and film. These works display the experimental character of his work but also his innovative use of this media. The artist documented his cuttings through photography and film whereby the importance of the working process, the publics encounter with the opened building and the related moments of danger formed into equal parts of his work. The medium of film was, however also employed by him in a reflective and analytical manner, e. g. as an instrument of supervision in Chinatown Voyeur (1971) or in researching the underground expansion of the cities like New York and Paris, as in Substrait (1976) and Sous-sols de Paris (1977). For a series of audacious performances, he also acted in front of the camera.