Roberto Matta

Selected Works

Roberto Matta
Un évitable, 1974
Huile sur toile
80 x 100 cm

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Roberto Matta
Folle-Royer, 1985
Huile sur toile
73 X 67 cm

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Roberto Matta
Voir L'Intelligence, 1973
Huile sur toile
96 X 80 cm

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Some of the works depicted are no longer available.

Biography

Matta's works are not intended to be realistic: they are visual torments, a tangle of swirling shapes, almost phosphorescent colors, sharp lines, and ghostly or robotic figures. Rather than illustrating specific events, they seek to translate the violence of the century.

Roberto Matta (1911-2002) was an artist from Santiago, Chile. In 1933, after graduating as an architect, he left his country to settle in France. There, he began working in Le Corbusier's studio, but it was his meeting with André Breton in 1937 that marked a decisive turning point in his career. He invited him to present his drawings at the first "Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme" in Paris in 1938. In 1939, Matta moved to New York, where he held his first solo exhibition in 1940. His works, influenced by automatism, are characterized by colors applied directly to the canvas using tubes or rags, and final touches with a brush. The resulting abstract landscapes create a dreamlike spatial universe, populated by colored elements floating freely in an endless void. From 1944, during his stay in New York, Matta began painting large formats, integrating exploded totemic figures, inspired by so-called primitive arts, and caught in networks of lines representing both "the immensity of the universe and the infinite depths of the psyche". Back in Europe in 1949, Matta divided his time between Rome and Paris. He began to explore political themes in his works, with the ambition of "giving a new image of man" and "visualizing history".

His painting Contro vosotros assassinos de palomas (1950) refers to the World Congress of Peace Partisans held in Paris in 1949, where the emblem was the dove drawn by Picasso. Other works with a historical dimension followed, inspired by the Rosenbergs' death sentence in New York in 1951, he produced works in reaction to Henri Alleg's book denouncing torture in Algeria, and in protest against the American intervention in Vietnam. These paintings are not intended to be realistic: they are visual torments, a tangle of swirling shapes, almost phosphorescent colors, sharp lines, and ghostly or robotic figures. Rather than illustrating specific events, they seek to translate the violence of the century, their meaning being suggested by the titles rather than by a direct representation. Matta, keen to be part of all revolutionary struggles, left for Cuba in 1967, for Paris in May 1968, and returned to his hometown in 1971. With him, a new kind of historical painting was born from the mixture of surrealism, abstraction and political commitment.

Public Collections

Amsterdam, Stedelijk Museum; Baltimore, NY, Baltimore Museum of Art; Bruxelles, Musée Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique: Cambridge, Harvard Art Museum, Cambridge MA; Chicago, IL, Art Institute of Chicago; Chicago, IL, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Chicago, IL, Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago; Cleveland, OH, Cleveland Museum of Art; Haifa, Haifa Museum of Art; Houston, TX, The Menil Collection; Houston, TX, The Museum of Fine Arts; Indianapolis, IN, Indianapolis Museum of Art; Londres, Tate Modern; Los Angeles, CA, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) Madrid, Musée Reine Sofia; Madrid, Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza; Mexico City, Museo Tamayo; Milwaukee, WI, Milwaukee Art Museum; New Heaven, CT, Yale University Art Gallery; New York, NY, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; New York, NY, Museum of Modern Art; New York, NY, Metropolitan Museum of Art; New York, NY, Whitney Museum of American Art; Paris, Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris; Paris, Musée national d’Art moderne – Centre Pompidou; Philadelphie, PA, Philadelphia Museum of Art; Pittsburgh, PA, Carnegie Museum of Art; Poughkeepsie, Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center – Vassar College; Princeton, NJ, Princeton Univeristy Art Museum Providence, RI, Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design; Saint Louis, MO, Saint Louis Art Museum; San Francisco, CA, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Santiago, Centro Cultural Palacio La Moneda; Santiago, Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende; Stockholm, Moderna Museet, Tel-Aviv-Yafo, Musée d’Art Moderne de Tel Aviv; Williamstown, MA, Williams College Museum of Art.