The blog this week is full of announcements!  I’m excited to post the Pulitzer’s next exhibition, opening October 30th.   The current working title is “Matta-Clark: Urban Fragments”.  Here’s the official description:

Trained as an architect, Gordon Matta-Clark (1943-1978) used neglected structures slated for demolition as his raw material. He literally carved out sections of buildings with a chainsaw. In this way, he revealed their hidden construction, provided new ways of perceiving space, and created metaphors for the human condition. When wrecking balls knocked down his sculpted buildings, little remained, which is why the artist documented his work with photography, film, and video. He also kept a few building segments, known as “cuts”. They include a piece of a floor from an apartment house in the Bronx, three sections of a house near Love Canal, a window from an abandoned warehouse on a pier in New York City, and four corners from the roof of a house in New Jersey. For this exhibition, the Pulitzer is borrowing from important institutions including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and from the private collection of John and Thomas Solomon. The Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark also plans to lend almost forty photographs that will be displayed throughout the Pulitzer. This will be the first time that the aforementioned “cuts” and photographs have been exhibited in St. Louis.

Matta-Clark’s poetic and daring involvement with the urban fabric did much to represent and reinterpret abandoned buildings and places. Using his work as a springboard for dialogue, the Pulitzer will prepare innovative programs that will help address critically the fate of many of St. Louis’s neighborhoods, which are presently filled with unoccupied structures and empty lots. Moreover, by placing Matta-Clark’s rough domestic “cuts” into the pristine public architecture by Tadao Ando at the Pulitzer, we hope not only to offer our audiences new ways to think about the artist and the architect, but also to incite questions concerning the social, political and geographical circumstances that give architecture its meaning.