Roberto Matta
Bio
(Chile, 1911- Italy, 2002) He studied Architecture at the Catholic University of Santiago. He then moved to Paris (1933-1935) to work as a draftsman in the studio of the French-Swiss architect Le Corbusier, and became friends with the painter Marcel Duchamp.
In 1936 he traveled to Spain, where he met the poet Federico García Lorca and the painter Salvador Dalí. At the beginning of World War II he moved to the United States. From 1939 to 1948 he lived in New York City, where he met André Breton, Max Ernst, Yves Tanguy and André Masson.
He was a participant and innovator of surrealism and a decisive figure in the group of abstract expressionist artists of the 1940s. At the beginning of his artistic work, his works reflected his metaphysical concerns and the importance of religious creations.
Statement
Starting in the 1950s, the artist began to express a growing interest in the political-social events of the world and, particularly, in the Latin American reality. Throughout his career, Matta's artistic work underwent various mutations and he ventured into different techniques. At the end of the 1930s he made his first large-format oil paintings, a medium that would be the most characteristic of his production. To create his initial works, he used surreal psychic automatism as a creative process, seeking to bring to light the most hidden visions of the mind. In the 1950s, coinciding with his move away from surrealism, Matta developed a personal poetics. This coincides, on the one hand, with the appearance of figurative elements in his paintings and, on the other, with the intensification of his political consciousness. Since the 70s, the presence of anthropomorphic figures in his images has become more and more frequent.
2.5 x 4m / 98.4 x 157 in
