MAXXI, Rome's National Museum of 21st Century Arts, will open Gordon Matta-Clark: Not the Work... The Worker on 13 November 2026. The exhibition runs until 28 February 2027 and traces the artist's creative trajectory from his experimental New York years to the work he made in Italy.

Matta-Clark (1943-1978) trained as an architect before turning buildings themselves into his material, cutting vast openings through derelict houses, piers and industrial structures. Works such as Conical Intersect, cut through a Paris building in 1975, made him the defining figure of what became known as anarchitecture, the use of demolition as a sculptural act. He died in 1978, aged 35, leaving a body of work that survives largely through film, photography and drawing, since the buildings themselves were demolished.

The Rome survey takes an interdisciplinary view of that practice, bringing together documentation, archival material, photographs, drawings and films. Its Italian focus reflects the time Matta-Clark spent working in the country, where his encounters with its built fabric shaped some of his most ambitious interventions. Among the works on view are films and photo-collages recording the cuts themselves, the only record of interventions that were always temporary.

The exhibition is presented with the support of the artist's estate and David Zwirner, which represents it. It opens on a busy weekend for Rome's museums: Shirin Neshat's Do U Dare! opens at MAXXI the same day, and Marina Abramovic's performance show opens at the Galleria Nazionale on 18 November. The MAXXI show follows a smaller Matta-Clark presentation, Discrete Violations, at the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-on-Sea, which runs until 4 January 2027.