The son of Chilean Surrealist Roberto Matta and Anne Clark and the godson of Marcel Duchamp, Gordon Robert Matta-Echaurren (1943–78) studied architecture at Cornell 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. Frustrated with the limitations of his chosen profession, Matta-Clark used his training in architecture instead as a base for his artistic explorations of space. He was an extremely prolific artist in a career barely spanning a decade that combined minimalist, conceptual, and performance practices. Best remembered for site-specific projects known as “building cuts,” these architectural interventions consisting of direct cuts into actual buildings scheduled for demolition now exist only as sculptural fragments, photographs, drawings, collages, and film and video documentations.

For the Paris Biennial in 1975, Matta-Clark carved a series of circles into the abandoned shell of a town house in the working-class section of Paris, alongside the skeletal frame of the Pompidou Center. Working on many levels, the cuts suggest a sense of physical and visual instability.