Nothing But Good: December 2021

Sunday, 26 December 2021

Bram Braam / Gordon Matta-Clark

Gordon Matta-Clark
Bingo
1974

painted wood, metal, plaster and glass, three sections

175,3 x 77,.8 x 25,4 cm

collection MoMA

Gordon Matta-Clark

Conical Intersect

1975

27-29 Rue Beaubourg, Paris

Still a huge influence for many young artists interested and dealing with topics related to architecture and space in our urban environment is Gordon Matta-Clark. Unfortunately he died way too young in 1978 when he was only 35. His radical approach to look beyond the limits of sculpture and 50 years after Duchamp’s ready-made “fountain” he declared our buildings, architecture and city spaces as his main artistic play field. Buildings, stairs, windows and floors became the main subject of the art itself, a building as a sculpture, splitting houses, cutting holes through the building, floors and walls. Sometimes he showed the elements he took out of the building and showed it in the museum, but mostly the building itself was the art work what was only visible for a short moment till the building was demolished. By making holes, you could look through the whole structure of the architecture and showing in his words “the heart of the building”

His way how to look for the limits of sculpture in our daily environment can be seen similarly in my own work, although differently. My works look like real fragments taken out of our landscapes but are in fact well thought in balanced constructed sculptural works. I play with the tension between reality and abstraction and dealing with the question: where am I looking at, is it real, is it staged, is it reconstructed or a mixture of all these things, questions to be made more than ever in our accelerated time.

The massive influence by Gordon Matta-Clark can be seen back in all of my works but specific in my use of materials and ambition to look differently to our daily reality. A wall as a painting, a building as a sculpture, a landscape as the art work.

Bram Braam, 2021