December 1st – 19th, 2007
Opening: Friday November 30th, 7pm-9pm
Exhibition Hours: Tuesday – Sunday, 2pm-7pm
The first ever exhibition in Ireland of New York conceptual artist Gordon Matta-Clark takes place 1st-19th December at thisisnotashop.
Jane Crawford, artist widow and director of the Gordon Matta-Clark Estate, will give a talk about the life and work of Gordon Matta-Clark on Tuesday December 4th at 10am at NCAD, room Go4-Go5 on the ground floor of the design block.
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.
His first Irish exhibition will focus 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.
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, and is 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.
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.
Gordon Matta-Clark 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.
Original documentary photographs and limited edition reprints will be offered for sale.
Thisisnotashop 