OFFICE BAROQUE: GORDON MATTA-CLARK

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 incisions 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.