Gordon Matta-Clark (USA, 1943- 1978) was a trained architect and conceptual artist who pioneered a radical approach to art making that directly engaged the urban environment and the communities within it. Matta-Clark is best known for large scale works involving cutting into buildings, examining the built environment in the mode of performative intervention.

His work transcended the genres of land art, performance, conceptualist and process based artmaking, inspiring artists across the generations. His work spanned writing, photography, film, drawing, architectural interventions, and socially engaged projects through a range of media and scenarios involving everything from food to detritus. For this years Middlesbrough Art Weekender theme of power POWER we are exhibiting a selection of facsimiles of legal documents and photographs from Matta-Clark’s ‘Fake Estates’ project, which documents his purchase of small vacant lots of varying shapes, sizes and inaccessibility in 70’s New York, parodying the absurdities and bureaucracy of land ownership.

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Matta-Clark’s work is represented in prominent public collections, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen, Antwerp; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and The Tate Modern, London. The Gordon Matta-Clark Archive is held at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal.