The breadth and depth of this show is little short of stunning and, like Gordon Matta-Clark’s work, unfolds a never-ending series of questions, about architecture, construction, deconstruction, performance, space and the microcosmic politics of urban living.

This is because Matta-Clark is one slippery customer. His works are easily described—most revolve around cuts made into the fabric of condemned buildings—but they are undefinable, open-ended interventions. When Matta-Clark slices a building right down the middle, or hollows out a conical space through interior walls, the making of the cuts is a performance of sorts, and this theatricality continues as visitors negotiate the newly unstable space. But Matta-Clark documents his actions too, and these unconventional (not to mention beautiful) photographic prints, sketches and texts do much more than simply record works that, by their very nature, are transitory. As curator Lisa Le Feuvre asks repeatedly in her annotations, ‘What is the work?’

Attempts to define the nature of these layers of practice – whether action or document – is equally tricky. Try to pin down Matta-Clark as, say, a sculptor, and you must deal with the fact that he literally deconstructs buildings, removing to create, un-making. Which doesn’t sound much like sculpture. Even his stated aims don’t gel, as with each explicitly political attempt to condemn the demolition of existing built landscapes to make way for the new, Matta-Clark himself demolished, replacing existing forms with the new.

In the end, this retrospective is one more Matta-Clark cut into the urban landscape: after a visit, you will never look at a building in the same way again.