Roberto Matta
Born – Santiago, c. Chile 1912
Died – Civitavecchia, Italy 2002
Roberto Sebastian Echaurren Matta trained as an architect in Santiago and under Le Corbusier in Paris. He turned to painting in 1937 and quickly became involved with the Surrealist movement in which he remained a prominent figure until he broke contact in 1947. Matta immigrated to America in 1939. The impact of his solo show at the Julien Levy Gallery in 1940 on American experimental artists was enormous. The automatism of Matta’s organic Surrealism provided a radical alternative to, and its inventiveness surpassed, the achievements of the academic European Surrealism of Dali, Magritte and Tanguy. During the 1940s, along with André Breton, Matta became one of the most influential émigré artists in New York, with paintings, such as Abstraction, combine ambiguous elements from the unconscious with landscapes from a volatile, futuristic dream-world. The cataclysmic, explosive meetings between brilliant highlights and thunderous shadows suggest cosmic violence, indefinable but evocatively wrought by abstract means. Matta’s work became more dynamic, developing into “transparent cubism”. From the mid-1940s he reintroduced the figure into increasingly mechanistic imagery.
Masterpieces:
- Invasion of the Night
- Disasters of Mysticism.
Text: The A-Z of Art, Nicola Hodge and Libby Anson.
Books About roberto matta
Matta: Surrealism and beyond
Curtis L Carter
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Matta in America: Paintings and Drawings of the 1940s
Elizabeth A.T. Smith
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Matta
Roberto Sebastian Matta Echaurren
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