Gordon Matta-Clark - Office Baroque

Coinciding with this year’s second Gallery Weekend Berlin, Galerie Thomas Schulte will be hosting an opening of the exhibition "Office Baroque", a documentary of Gordon Matta-Clark’s spectacular project in Antwerp in 1977. The opening will run from 4 to 10 pm on Friday, June 11.

"Office Baroque" marks the sixth exhibition that since 1994 the gallery will be showing with the New York born artist, Gordon Matta-Clark: previous exhibitions include "Bingo", "The City as Resource", "The Complete Films", and "Notebook Drawings".

Gordon Matta-Clark counts as one of the most influential artists of his generation in the 1970’s. Following his architecture studies at Cornell University, Matta-Clark delved into his work with investigating alternative drafts to conventional architecture and the intense empathy towards aspects of the urbanized lebensraum. And so, through exact, dissecting observation and with an air of modern archaeology, a new form of sculpture was born. Furthermore, Matta-Clark’s inscriptions and inci-sions into sculptural realms of already existing architectural objects became his trademark. In this respect it is fascinating with what enormous dynamics and ingenious acquisition of space he encroached on the buildings and how important his sketches became as fields of practice and experimentation.

"Office Baroque" is one of the most striking projects of the deceased artist. In 1977, allied with leading Belgian curator and museum-founder, Florent Bex, Matta-Clark was able to secure an abandoned office building in Antwerp and tactically cut pieces out of the roof, the walls, and ceilings, incising a spatial drawing into the building from top to bottom.

Some of the cut-outs became sculptures in their own right, while the resulting spatial relations in the building were documented on photographs. This photographic documentation was the premise for Matta-Clark’s typical colligated Cibachromes that build the core also of this exhibition. In addition there are significant sketches and a documentary film that depicts the project’s development.

The exhibition was enabled through close cooperation with Florent Bex and consists almost exclusively of loaned works from public and private collections in Belgium as well as various pieces from the artist’s estate.

Gordon Matta-Clark was born in New York in 1943. The architect and conceptual artist studied at Cornell University and the Sorbonne in Paris. Important solo exhibitions include the Paris Biennale (1975), the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (1977; 1978; 1985), the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (1986), and the Reina Sofia in Madrid (1997; 2006). Notable group exhibitions count the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1971), the Documenta in Kassel (1972; 1977), the P.S.1 MoMA in New York (1976), the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Francisco (1993; 1999), the Hamburger Kunsthalle (2000), the Tate Modern in London (2005), and the Musée National d’Art Modern in Paris (2005). The artist has received numerous grants and awards including the Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship (1977) and the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship Theodoron (1975). Gordon Matta-Clark died in 1978 in New York.

Gordon Matta-Clark
Office Baroque