Gordon Matta-Clark

We still have original Gordon Matta-Clark photographs for sale from his cutting projects “Splitting”, “Office Baroque”, and “Circus”. They are 8×10 black and white photos taken and printed by Matta-Clark. For more information and prices please contact Jessamyn Fiore at jessamynfiore@gmail.com

We also still have the beautiful art book published by Phaidon Press about Gordon Matta-Clark for sale at our gallery- please feel free to drop in and purchase a copy.

Food : Gordon Matta-Clark / December 1st to 19th
Thisisnotashop is proud to present the first exhibition in Ireland of New York conceptual artist Gordon Matta-Clark. The exhibition focuses on the restaurant opened by Matta-Clark in Soho, NYC, in 1971 called Food. Food was at once a good/cheap place to eat, an employer for any struggling artist, a meeting place for the burgeoning artistic community, a performance space, and a work of art. Consisting of documentary photographs and film, the exhibition will explore Food in the context of Matta-Clark’s artistic work and the role it played in the art community of 1970’s New York.

Now internationally recognized as one of the most important American artists of the 1970’s, Gordon Matta-Clark was a central figure in the birth of the artistic community in Soho, NYC, which included such luminaries as Robert Smithson, Dennis Oppenheim, Mary Heilmann, and Robert Rauschenberg. He opened the two main gathering places of the artistic community at the time: Food Restaurant and 112 Greene Street, the first cooperative art gallery in America.

Matta-Clark’s work took art out of the traditional museum context and into the streets where he deconstructed disused spaces to highlight the social problems and possibilities of the decaying urban landscape in which his community lived in worked. As a sculptor takes a chisel to marble, Matta-Clark took a chainsaw to abandoned buildings cutting through walls and floors, exposing layers of the past to light and air, taking the viewer out of the safety of the museum/gallery and directly into the art work. He evolved obsolete architecture into stunning works of art that challenge us to question our notions of security and safety both socially and psychologically.
Though he died young before the close of the seventies, he left behind a body of work that is now celebrated world wide and has inspired subsequent generations of artists and architects because of its courage, passion, and genius. Major recent exhibitions of Matta-Clark’s work include a retrospective that opened at the Whitney Museum in NYC in February and is now at LA MOCA in Los Angeles, CA, son heading to the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art early next year. In 2006 there was an award winning exhibition of his work at the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid, Spain, and he was a central featured artist at the San Paolo Biennial in Brazil.