Gordon Matta-Clark made sculpture by taking things away. With saws and jacks he sliced a suburban house in two, cut cones and spheres through condemned buildings, and opened a warehouse wall to the river. The buildings were later demolished, so what survives are films, photographs, drawings and collages in which he cut the photographs as he had cut the walls. For designers, that makes him a teacher of negative space, sightlines and the drama of an unexpected opening.
The Met and the Art Institute of Chicago both hold Gordon Matta-Clark works, but none is flagged as public domain, and the Cleveland Museum of Art’s open-access search returns none. This guide therefore describes his work in text only, and the featured image is a title card. For images cleared for reuse, browse the MGD museum inspiration collection.
Who was Gordon Matta-Clark?
The Art Institute of Chicago and the Met both catalogue him as American, 1943–1978. The Art Institute identifies him as the son of the Surrealist painter Roberto Matta, and its record for the elder Matta adds that the son was named after the painter Gordon Onslow Ford.
According to the Art Institute, Matta-Clark studied architecture at Cornell University from 1962 to 1968, where he met the sculptor Robert Smithson, whose interest in land art and entropy influenced him. He then moved to New York and became part of the artists’ community in SoHo. In 1971 he co-founded FOOD, an artist-run restaurant at the corner of Prince and Wooster Streets, with Carol Goodden and Tina Girouard, as several histories of the neighbourhood record; the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid holds a work titled Food connected with it.
The Art Institute notes that he died of cancer at the age of 35, and that in a short career he made more than twenty films documenting his architectural interventions.
Anarchitecture and the building cuts
The Art Institute describes his series of “building cuts” (1972–78) as his main contribution: he carved sections out of whole structures and treated them as spatial compositions. He called these transformations “Anarchitecture,” and exhibited the films and photographs in galleries, often alongside fragments of the buildings themselves.
The cuts were usually simple shapes, such as straight slices, circles, cones and spheres, laid against the irregular reality of old floors, joists and wallpaper. That contrast between a clean geometric idea and the messy layers it exposes is the core of the work’s visual power.
Splitting: a house cut in two
Splitting (1974) was made in a house in New Jersey. The Art Institute’s record explains that the house, an old frame building in Englewood, New Jersey, belonged to the New York art dealer Holly Solomon and was slated for demolition. Matta-Clark and friends made two parallel cuts down the centre of the house, jacked up one half, bevelled the block foundation beneath it, then lowered that half again, so the building split open and a band of light ran through its interior. The museum adds that the house was levelled three months later.
The Art Institute holds the film, shot on Super 8 and transferred to 16mm, about 10 minutes 50 seconds long. The Met holds Splitting as chromogenic prints mounted on board, 101.6 by 76.2 cm, and as a set of photomechanical prints.
For designers, Splitting shows how one decisive cut can reorganise a whole space. A narrow slot of light makes the viewer read the house as a section drawing come to life.
Day’s End, Conical Intersect and Office Baroque
In Day’s End (1975), according to the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA), Matta-Clark cut an opening shaped like a giant eye into the wall of an abandoned warehouse on a derelict Manhattan pier.
Conical Intersect (1975) was his contribution to the Paris Biennale that year. MACBA describes a cut through two adjacent seventeenth-century buildings slated for demolition, which let passers-by look into the interiors; Places Journal locates it at the Plateau Beaubourg.
Office Baroque (1977) cut through a five-storey office building in Antwerp, and the Antwerp museum M HKA records an exhibition linked to it at the I.C.C. in Antwerp from October to November 1977. Places Journal also lists Bingo (1974), made in Niagara Falls, New York.
Circus and the cut photograph
In 1978 he made a cut in Chicago. The Art Institute explains that Circus (Caribbean Orange) was commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago: Matta-Clark carved three spherical volumes, like a three-ring circus, from a three-storey townhouse next to the museum’s former building before it became gallery space.
The Art Institute’s collage of the same title, a strip of silver dye-bleach prints about 57 by 171 cm, shows what he did with the documentation. He printed slides of the cut space and then cut into the photographs themselves, piecing views together so that the collage approximates walking around inside the work. The result is a long, panoramic composition with curved edges and overlapping viewpoints, closer to a storyboard than a single picture.
The same habit of thinking on paper shows in the Art Institute’s Untitled (Arrows, Notebook) (1974), a sheet of fibre-tipped pen drawings about 28 by 43 cm, and in Photo Fry (1969), an instant print kept in a box.
Fake Estates: design with leftover space
Not every project used a saw. For Reality Properties: Fake Estates (1973–74), Matta-Clark bought fifteen tiny, unusable slivers of land at New York City auctions, fourteen in Queens and one on Staten Island, according to the Queens Museum’s account of the 2005 exhibition Odd Lots. The Guggenheim holds one such work, Fake Estates (Little Alley Block 2497, Lot 42) (1973), which combines a photographic collage, a property deed and a site map.
The design idea is the same as in the cuts: look for the leftover gaps in a system and make them visible.
What to look at in a Gordon Matta-Clark work
Composition. A single clean geometric void set against a busy, layered structure. Notice where the cut sits: often off-centre, angled or rising through several floors.
Palette. The palette is that of the found buildings: plaster, raw timber, faded paint and patterned wallpaper, lit by daylight through the openings.
Line. The cut edge is the main line. In the collages, the cut edges of photographs echo the cuts in the walls.
Light. Openings act as light sources. In Splitting, the Art Institute describes the cut filling the once-divided interior with light.
Format. Films, photo-collages, notebooks, deeds and building fragments.
How designers can borrow Gordon Matta-Clark’s ideas
Design by subtraction. Start with a full layout and remove a shape. A circular or diagonal knockout through a photograph or a dense block of text can create a focal point stronger than anything added. The geometric pattern design guide covers the basic shapes.
Reveal the section. Cutaway illustrations, exploded views and section diagrams borrow his logic of showing what lies inside a structure.
Cut and reassemble photographs. Panoramic collages built from several frames, with visible joins, suggest movement through a space. Sample the plaster and timber tones from your own photographs with the MGD image colour picker.
Work with the leftovers. Like Fake Estates, look at the margins, gutters and odd gaps in a grid as places where design can happen. Designers interested in his circle can read the Robert Smithson guide, and the Chris Burden guide follows another artist of the 1970s who turned to large structures.
Matta-Clark’s works remain in copyright. Borrow the methods, not the images.
Frequently asked questions
What is Gordon Matta-Clark known for?
He is known for “building cuts” made between 1972 and 1978, in which he removed sections of buildings due for demolition and recorded the results in films and photographs. He called the approach “Anarchitecture.” Key works include Splitting (1974), Day’s End (1975) and Conical Intersect (1975).
What was Splitting?
Splitting (1974) was a house in Englewood, New Jersey, that Matta-Clark cut in two with parallel cuts down its centre, then lowered one half onto a bevelled foundation so light passed through the gap. The Art Institute of Chicago records that the house was demolished three months later.
Was Gordon Matta-Clark an architect?
He studied architecture at Cornell University from 1962 to 1968, according to the Art Institute of Chicago, but worked as an artist, using buildings as his material.
Can I use Gordon Matta-Clark’s images in my designs?
No museum record consulted for this guide flags his work as public domain; the Met and the Art Institute of Chicago both mark their Matta-Clark works as not public domain. You can borrow his subtractive methods using material you have the right to use.
