Gordon Matta-Clark: An Archival Sourcebook
Wouter Davidts, Lieven De Cauter, An Fonteyne, Gwendolyn Owens, Philip Ursprung
CIVA has the pleasure to invite you to the book launch of Gordon Matta-Clark: An Archival Sourcebook, with a conversation between the editors, Gwendolyn Owen and Philip Ursprung, as well as Wouter Davidts, Lieven De Cauter, and An Fonteyne.
The art of Gordon Matta-Clark (1943-1978) still holds up a mirror to architecture today. When, in 2002, Matta-Clark’s widow Jane Crawford put his archive on deposit at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal there was suddenly a new voice in the ongoing discussion of his work: his own. His texts, notes and letters, previously only published in scattered form, have now been collected and made accessible for the first time in a book. With Gordon Matta-Clark: An Archival Sourcebook Gwendolyn Owens and Philip Ursprung bring new insight into the artist’s practice. Featuring selected material from the CCA archive as well as other sources, they create a multi-dimensional portrait of the artist. The book opens up a wealth of new sources for the discussion of architecture and art. At CIVA, the editors will discuss to relevance of Matta-Clark’s thinking for the contemporary discourse in art and architecture.
BOOK HERE
Gwendolyn Owens is Director of the McGill Visual Arts Collection in Montreal since 2013. She has held curatorial positions at Cornell University, Williams College, the University of Maryland, and the Canadian Centre for Architecture. Her publications include articles, exhibition catalogues, and books on a wide range of subjects in American and Canadian art and design: from mid-nineteenth century American landscape painters to kitchen wallpaper in Canada, to Georgia O’Keeffe. She was responsible for cataloguing the Gordon Matta-Clark archive at the CCA in Montreal. She wrote essays for a number of publications on Matta-Clark including a text on his early years at Cornell University for the 2007 Whitney retrospective You are the measure and co-curated exhibitions including Out of the Box for CCA in 2003 and Architecture: A Detective Story for Columbia University’s School of Architecture in 2006.
Philip Ursprung is Professor of the History of Art and Architecture at ETH Zurich. He served as Dean of the Department of Architecture from 2017 to 2019. He taught at Universität der Künste Berlin, Columbia University New York, the Barcelona Institute of Architecture, Cornell University and the University of Zurich and, was director of the research project “Tourism and Urbanization” at Future Cities Laboratory in Singapore. He is editor of Herzog & de Meuron: Natural History (2002) and Caruso St John: Almost Everything (2008). He is author of Die Kunst der Gegenwart (2010), Allan Kaprow, Robert Smithson, and the Limits to Art (2013), and Joseph Beuys: Kunst Kapital Revolution (2021). With the exhibition Neighbours he represented Switzerland together with Karin Sander at the 18th Architecture Biennale Venice (2023).
