Gordon Matta-Clark
1943-1978
Gordon Matta-Clark (born Gordon Roberto Echaurren Matta; June 22, 1943 – August 27, 1978) was an American artist best known for his site-specific artworks he made in the 1970s. Matta-Clark's parents were artists: Anne Clark, an American artist, and Roberto Matta, a Chilean Surrealist painter, of Basque, French and Spanish descent. He was the godson of Marcel Duchamp. His twin brother Sebastian, also an artist, committed suicide in 1976. He studied architecture at Cornell University from 1962 to 1968, including a year at the Sorbonne in Paris, where he studied French literature. In 1971, he changed his name to Gordon Matta-Clark, adopting his mother's last name.[3] He did not practice as a conventional architect; he worked on what he referred to as “Anarchitecture”. At the time of Matta-Clark's tenure there, Cornell's architecture program was guided in part by Colin Rowe, a preeminent architectural theorist of modernism.[citation needed] Matta-Clark used a number of media to document his work, including film, video, and photography. His work includes performance and recycling pieces, space and texture works, and his "building cuts". He also used puns and other word games as a way…
Films