The first Asian retrospective of Gordon Matta-Clark, an artist who remains immensely popular worldwide even 40 years after his death, will be held at the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo from June 19th to September 17th.


Gordon Matta-Clark, who was active mainly in New York in the 1970s and passed away at the young age of 35, was involved in a wide range of activities over the course of approximately 10 years, including art, architecture, street culture, and running the artist-run restaurant "FOOD." At the heart of his work, which took place in New York, a testing ground for capitalism at a time when the global economy was beginning to experience explosive growth, was the search for ways in which art could contribute to the creation of prosperous communities. His light-hearted, cool, and poetic work continues to fascinate people around the world even today.


Since most of Matta-Clark's works are held in private collections or in renowned Western museums such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, there has not been an opportunity to present them comprehensively in Asia until now. This exhibition focuses on five "places" that were important to him, who worked in cities: home, street, port, market, and museum, and features approximately 200 pieces including sculptures, videos, photographs, drawings, and documents. This time, visitors can see rare works such as Splitting: Four Corners (owned by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art), the largest three-dimensional work from his representative "Building Cut" series, which will be coming to Japan for the first time.


At the venue, 1970 By incorporating materials that show the cultural and social background of New York in the 1970s, as well as materials related to the present-day Tokyo in which we live, the exhibition brings to light the contemporary significance of Matta-Clark's practice in a modern, ever-changing city.

Today, Tokyo is experiencing social contraction before the rest of the world. His light, cool, and poetic ideas offer various hints for each of us to think about what we can do now to live richer lives.