Galerie La Patinoire Royale Bach presents Gordon Matta-Clark, the first major solo exhibition of the renowned American artist in Belgium in over thirty years.
With a focus on Matta-Clark’s canonical building-cut architectural interventions, the exhibition presents a large selection of collages, photographs, films, and books the artist made around Bronx Floors (1972), Walls (1972), Splitting (1974), Bingo (1974), and Conical Intersect (1975). The gallery has placed a special focus on Office Baroque (1977), the iconic intervention the artist undertook in Belgium one year before his premature death. The artworks dialogue with an immersive large-scale installation of Matta-Clark’s film works in the gallery’s soaring nave including the lesser known City Slivers (1976). The show pays tribute to an artist whose innovative, genre-busting practice, which literally opened spaces and brashly reoriented perspectives in the environments he found himself, has rippled through subsequent generations of artists and is more relevant than ever.
Throughout Matta-Clark’s practice, photography and film were essential modes of documentation and artmaking in themselves, through which he explored some of the major ideas underpinning his practice. The gallery selection focuses on his image based practices and includes never-exhibited works from the Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark, along with works that have been shown in the major retrospectives devoted to the artist at the Whitney Museum, The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, The Getty Center and Jeu de Paume.