Name: Gordon Matta-Clark

Biography: Gordon Matta-Clark (1943-1978), was the son of Surrealist painter Roberto Matta Echaurren and artist Anne Clark was born in New York City. Matta-Clark's father abandoned him, his mother and his twin brother within months of his birth. However, artist Marcel Duchamp was his godfather and other family friends such as the painter Robert Motherwell and sculptor Isamu Noguchi (Yee 14). Matta-Clarke followed in his father's footsteps and studied architecture and worked for Le Corbusier in Paris; he enrolled in the School of Architecture at Cornell University in 1962. During his first year, he was involved in a fatal car accident and spent time recuperating in Paris. He returned. After one year he returned to Cornell. He eventually earned a degree in architecture (Yee 14). Matta-Clark broke out from the traditional path of creating architecture and was fascinated by buildings on the verge of being destroyed. He is best known for his work "Splitting", which was made by cutting vertical lines through the entire width of a house. In order to capture these interventions, he began using photography and film as a medium to document his work.

Biography CItation #1: Pioneers of the Downtown Scene New York 1970s. London: Barbican Art Gallery, 2011. Print.

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Image Citation #1: Pioneers of the Downtown Scene New York 1970s. London: Barbican Art Gallery, 2011. Print. p56

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Image Citation #2: "Splitting (1974)". N.d. The New York Times, New York. Web. 9 Dec 2012. .

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