Gordon Matta-Clark

Coming just a year before Gordon Matta-Clark’s death, Office Baroque, 1977, was the artist doing, in Antwerp, Belgium, what he did best: slicing through an abandoned building to turn it into a monumental sculpture. This exhibition presents documentation of that work, sourced mainly from private collections. The photographs that make up the bulk of the show shed light on the brilliant, considered geometry of Matta-Clark’s intervention. Alongside these images, a forty-five-minute documentary presents a compelling, if slightly romantic, image of the artist creating the piece: young, good with a chainsaw, and hugely optimistic about the power of his practice to change the way people feel about space. The photos and the film create a clear picture of how, with quiet bravery rather than noisy bravado, Matta-Clark managed to break Minimalism’s dependence on the white cube and Earth art’s reliance on grandiose landscapes, finding instead a uniquely urban framework for his site-specific sculptures.

The gallery deserves credit not just for its presentation of the work but also for its timing, which couldn’t be better. Not far away at Martin-Gropius-Bau is a major exhibition by Olafur Eliasson, who is a clear inheritor of Matta-Clark’s tradition. Meanwhile, this year’s Berlin Biennial, which roots itself strongly in the city’s environment, is full of artists in debt to Matta-Clark’s legacy. Seeing his work in this context thus reminds viewers just how relevant his brief career still is to those making site-specific work in urban spaces. The quality of everything connected with Office Baroque—its conception, its execution, and its final, temporary beauty—illustrates, yet again, what a huge loss Matta-Clark’s untimely death was for contemporary art.