Gordon Matta-Clark’s father was Roberto Matta, the famous Surrealist painter.
Marcel Duchamp was his godfather, and his namesake was the English Surrealist artist Gordon Onslow-Ford.
Matta-Clark contracted tuberculosis when he was five and developed Addison’s disease for which he had to take regular cortisone shots throughout his life.
Matta was a student when the Cornell art gallery organized a groundbreaking exhibition called “Earth Art”; the artists involved were Robert Smithson, Dennis Oppenheim, Jan Dibbets, Richard Long, Robert Morris, and Hans Haacke. Matta-Clark assisted Oppenheim with his Beebe Lake Ice Cut.
Matta-Clark’s first New York exhibit was a group show called “Documentations” (1969). He brought in an old-fashioned stove and started burning Polaroids, and left the remains in the gallery. Later that year, friends started receiving gifts of burnt Polaroids flecked with gold.
In 1971 Matta-Clark opened a restaurant called Food with a group of friends (many of whom were associated with the Anarchitecture circle). They converted an abandoned bodega and used it to serve relatively cheap, good-quality food to the neighborhood.
Matta-Clark’s performance pieces were not always well received. For an exhibition titled “Idea as Model” at the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, Matta-Clark created quite a stir when he blew out every window of the exhibition space with an air rifle and hung pictures of blown-out windows in a housing project in the South Bronx; people were horrified.
Matta-Clark founded Loisaida (after the Loisaida neighborhood in New York), a resource center that promoted recycling and mentored children.
In 1976 Matta-Clark’s twin brother, Batan, fell out of a window and died. He was only 32.
After Matta-Clark’s death, Robert Rauschenberg paid all of the artist’s outstanding medical bills.
