In a world premiere, the film My Summer 77 with Gordon Matta-Clark, about Office Baroque, one of the artist's last building cuts, in Antwerp, will be shown for the first time. Berg has also donated the film Office Baroque by Cherica Convents and Roger Staylaerts.

MACBA, the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, presents My Summer 77 with Gordon Matta-Clark (1977-2012), a film never before seen, on the creation in Antwerp of Office Baroque (1978), one of the artist’s last building cuts. Promoted by Harold Berg, the film was made and produced by Cherica Convents.

Invited by the Internationaal Cultureel Centrum (ICC) of Antwerp (Belgium), Gordon Matta-Clark (New York, 1943-1978) spent the period from May to August 1977 working on Office Baroque, one of the few building cuts that the artist felt should be conserved. However, despite all efforts to this end, on 3 June 1980 Antwerp City Council executed the order to demolish the building. All that remains from that legendary intervention are a few of the artist’s notes, vestiges from the building kept in different collections and museums, photographic documents and a film made by Cherica Convents.

Thirty-five years later, Cherica Convents has recovered unseen sequences from that film shoot. The footage that now sees the light shows a thoughtful and talkative Gordon Matta-Clark who is, nonetheless, immersed in brutally hard, physical work. The camera captures him as if it were filming a dance featuring an architectural speculation, translated into what the artist himself calls an atmosphere of “dust, ruins, depravation and spatial complexity.” This 30-minute film provides an outstanding resource for indepth study of one of the most influential 20th-century artists.

Harold Berg donated My Summer 77 with Gordon Matta-Clark to the MACBA Collection together with another film, Office Baroque, by Roger Steylaerts and Cherica Convents. These documents are added to Portfolio Office Baroque, which the collector himself built up, and will be on display in the MACBA exhibition rooms until October 21. The new acquisitions to the MACBA Collection make the Museum a reference for understanding the last period in Gordon Matta-Clark’s production. Moreover, the additions also furthers MACBA’s commitment to increasing its holdings of heritage relating to artistic practices from the 1970s characterised by their critical stance.

Gordon Matta-Clark.

Works by Gordon Matta-Clark at MACBA
Harold Berg acquired the Florent Bex photographic archive to add it to his LATA Collection (a name that alludes to its Latin American origins), depositing these works in the form of a permanent loan to the MACBA Foundation on 23 May de 2011. The holding comprises 46 works: 44 vintage black-and-white photographs on paper (25 °— 20 cm); 1 black-and-white negative; and 1 manipulated slide. The Bex Archive contains a series of photographs by Gordon Matta-Clark of the ephemeral interventions he made in buildings, using cuts and extractions from floors, walls and other structural elements. Thanks to the acquisition of these 46 works from the LATA Collection, added to the latest donations, MACBA holdings include a total of 65 pieces by Matta-Clark (the Museum already possessed 17 works – 13 videos, 2 photographs and 2 photocollages). Consequently, MACBA is one of the European museums with the largest number of works by this artist, along with the Generali Foundation (Vienna), the Georges Pompidou (Paris) and the Reina Sofía (Madrid).

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Gordon Matta-Clark (born Gordon Roberto Echaurren Matta; June 22, 1943 – August 27, 1978) was an American artist best known for his site-specific artworks he made in the 1970s. His parents were artists: Anne Clark, an American artist, and Roberto Matta, a Chilean Surrealist painter, of Spanish and French descent. He was the godson of Marcel Duchamp's wife, Teeny. His twin brother Sebastian, also an artist, committed suicide in 1976.

He studied architecture at Cornell University from 1962 to 1968, including a year at the Sorbonne in Paris, where he studied French literature. In 1971, he changed his name to Gordon Matta-Clark, adopting his mother's last name. He did not practice as a conventional architect; he worked on what he referred to as "Anarchitecture".

Matta-Clark used a number of media to document his work, including film, video, and photography. His work includes performance and recycling pieces, space and texture works, and his "building cuts". He also used puns and other word games as a way to re-conceptualize preconditioned roles and relationships (of everything, from people to architecture).

In February, 1969, the "Earth Art" show, curated by Willoughby Sharp at the invitation of Tom Leavitt, was realized at Andrew Dickson White Museum of Art, Cornell University. Matta-Clark, who lived in Ithaca at the time, was invited by Willoughby Sharp to help the artists in "Earth Art" with the on-site execution of their works for the exhibition. Sharp then encouraged Gordon Matta-Clark to move to New York City where Sharp continued to introduce him to members of the New York art world. Matta-Clark's work, Museum, at Klaus Kertess' Bykert Gallery, was listed and illustrated on pages 4–5 of Avalanche 1, Fall 1970.

In 1971 Matta-Clark, Carol Goodden, and Tina Girouard co-founded FOOD, a restaurant in Manhattan's Soho neighborhood; managed and staffed by artists. The restaurant turned dining into an event with an open kitchen and exotic ingredients that celebrated cooking. The activities at FOOD helped delineate how the art community defined itself in downtown Manhattan. The first of its kind in SoHo, Food became well known among artists and was a central meeting-place for groups such as the Philip Glass Ensemble, Mabou Mines, and the dancers of Grand Union. He ran FOOD until 1973.

In the early 1970s and in the context of his artistic community surrounding FOOD, Matta-Clark developed the idea of "anarchitecture" - a conflation of the words anarchy and architecture - to suggest an interest in voids, gaps, and left-over spaces. With his project Fake Estates, Matta-Clark addressed these issues of non-sites by purchasing at auction 15 leftover and unusably small slivers of land in Queens and Staten Island, New York, for $25–$75 a plot. He documented them through photographs, maps, bureaucratic records and deeds, and spoke and wrote about them - but was not able to occupy these residual elements of zoning irregularities in any other way.

In 1974, he performed a literal deconstruction, by removing the facade of a condemned house along the Love Canal, and moving the resulting walls to Artpark, in his work Bingo.

For the Biennale de Paris in 1975, he made the piece titled Conical Intersect by cutting a large cone-shaped hole through two townhouses dating from the 17th century in the market district known as Les Halles which were to be knocked down in order to construct the then-controversial Centre Georges Pompidou.

For his final major project, Circus or The Caribbean Orange (1978), Matta-Clark made circle cuts in the walls and floors of a townhouse next-door to the first Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, building (237 East Ontario Street), thus altering the space entirely.

Following his 1978 project, the MCA presented two retrospectives of Matta-Clark's work, in 1985 and in 2008. The 2008 exhibition You Are the Measure included never-before-displayed archival material of his 1978 Chicago project. You Are the Measure traveled to the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
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