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In the wake of the cut: researching Gordon Matta-Clark in New York and New Hampshire

A person stands in a white-walled art gallery, facing three framed black and white photographic artworks. The artwork on the far left is a vertical triptych of interior doorways. The central artwork is a diptych depicting interior spaces. The artwork on the right is a large framed piece with a central photographic collage of a building under construction, accompanied by a vertical strip of small photographic prints.

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In preparation for the winter exhibition opening in October, our Head of Visual Arts, Ned McConnell, travelled to New York for research and reported back.

There are artists you think you know from reproduction, and then there is the encounter with the thing itself, which quietly rearranges everything. Gordon Matta-Clark has been such an artist for me. This summer, ahead of Gordon Matta-Clark: Discrete Violations, opening in our First Floor Gallery on 10 October 2026, I travelled to New York and then north to New Hampshire to spend time with the work at close range and to test, against the evidence, the ideas that will shape the exhibition.

The first days were spent at David Zwirner, where a body of Matta-Clark’s photographs and film-strips of building-cut works had been laid out for study. It is one thing to describe, in a text, how Matta-Clark turned the demolition of a building into a kind of drawing in space; it is another to stand in front of the spliced and layered photo-collages and feel how deliberately composed that apparent violence is. Held to the light, the work reveals a maker who was always thinking about the frame, the section, the seam. Selecting from this material, deciding what a Bexhill audience should encounter first, and how one image might speak to the next, is the quiet, unglamorous heart of curating, and there is no substitute for doing it in the room. My thanks to the team at David Zwirner for their time and for such generous access.

Two people sit at a round wooden table with papers and drinks. A young person with curly dark hair and a mustache wears a light brown button-up shirt and looks to the left. An older person with blonde, curly hair wears a dark floral-patterned top and looks to the right. In front of them on the table are two glasses of water, one red coaster, a folder with papers and diagrams, and a large binder. A person with curly hair wearing a black t-shirt is sitting at a round white table, writing in a notebook. The table is covered with framed prints and loose papers, some of which are labeled. In the background, a white-walled room features framed artwork on the walls and recessed lighting in the ceiling.

From the city I went out to the artist’s estate in New Hampshire, where Jane Crawford and Jessamyn Fiore welcomed me and shared the archive with real generosity. To sit with the proposals, plans, correspondence and the offcuts of a life’s practice is to be reminded that Matta-Clark’s cuts were never only destructive. They were speculative, even tender, a way of opening architecture up rather than obeying it, of asking what a building conceals and who it excludes. Spending time with Odd Lots and the Fake Estates material, those slivers of unusable New York land he bought and catalogued, I was struck again by how much of his thinking turns on ownership, waste and the overlooked, questions that feel newly urgent as we approach our own reopening and think hard about who our building is for.

A person in a black t-shirt and white pants stands in a white-walled art gallery, looking at two framed black and white photographic artworks on the wall.

I came home with a notebook full of connections I could not have made from a desk in Sussex, and with a clearer sense of the exhibition’s shape: not a retrospective, but an argument about attention, structure and the things we choose to keep or tear down.

This research would not have been possible without the support of the Art Fund Jonathan Ruffer Curatorial Grant, whose funding allows curators the time and travel that serious exhibition-making requires. I am enormously grateful to Art Fund, to David Zwirner, and to Jane Crawford and Jessamyn Fiore at the estate, and I look forward to sharing what it has made possible when Discrete Violations opens in October.

LEARN MORE ABOUT THE EXHIBITION HERE

Posted by Joel Cheshire on Wednesday 2 September 2026