For Art Basel’s OVR: Pioneers, Galerie Thomas Schulte presents a special selection of extremely rare Cut Drawings and preeminent photographic works by Gordon Matta-Clark, who is mostly known for his spectacular building interventions from the mid-1970s.

Trained as an architect in the late 1960s and originally closely related to Land Art, Matta-Clark explored the notion of a "mutable space" throughout his short, yet productive and influential career in the 1970s. In doing so, the artist fundamentally challenged traditional concepts of recognition and use of space in art as well as our comprehension of it as a concept. His influence on artistic and architectural practices for decades to come cannot be overestimated.

The surviving documentation of Matta-Clark’s approaches to working with space is through his DIY-style films, along with his novel photographic collages, which try to capture the altered spatial experience induced by his interventions. The most unusual and rarest works, however, are Matta Clark's Cut Drawings, of which only about 25 to 30 were made between 1972 and 1976. They can be seen as thinking pads in the development of complex projects such as Conical Intersect (Paris, 1975) or Office Baroque (Antwerp, 1977).

Our selection of works comprises three Cut Drawings and five photographic works from four of Matta-Clark’s most important building cuts, beginning with one of his very first interventions, Splitting.