Gordon Matta-Clark was born in New York City, New York, on 22 June 1943 and died in Nyack, New York, on 27 August 1978. He was the second of twin sons born to two Surrealist artists, Chilean Roberto Matta-Echaurren (ca. 1912-2002) and American Anna Louise Clark (1914-1997). He entered the architecture program at Cornell University in 1962 but left in 1963 and spent the following year in Paris living with his father and studying French. He returned to Cornell in 1964 and by the time of his graduation in spring 1968 he was among the outstanding students. In mid-1969, Matta-Clark moved to New York City and his early projects involved transformations: such as Photo-Fry (1969), Agar (1969-1970), Garbage Wall (1970), and Time Well (1971). He began executing building interventions in 1971 when he cut walls in a loft in New York City to create Sauna (1971) and at the Museo de Bellas Artes in Santiago where he made an untitled wall cutting (1971). Throughout the following years of his major building cuts, Matta-Clark continued to explore other aspects of cities and their structures. Matta-Clark married Jane Crawford in 1978 but soon passed away from cancer, two months after his 35th birthday.



Text: Francesco Garutti, Yann Chateigné, Hila Peleg, Kitty Scott