Roberto Matta – Biography of Roberto Matta

by
Roberto Matta Echaurren Antonio Sebastian He was a Chilean painter who created mysterious and fantastic environments, identified with the international surrealist movement.

Matta He was born on November 11, 1911 in Santiago de Chile, in a family of Basque-French origin, of great social lineage and economic resources.

He completed an architecture degree at the Catholic University of Santiago (1931) and moved to Paris in 1933 to work with the influential architect and urban planner Le Corbusier. Working in the studio of the prestigious architect, Matta he became more and more interested in painting. Furthermore, his friendship with the avant-garde of various European centers – Gertrude Stein, Marcel Duchamp, Walter Gropius, Salvador Dalí, Federico García Lorca, André Breton and others, stimulated his interest in the surrealist movement; by 1936 he had already abandoned his career in architecture.

His stylistic development was rapid. By the time he moved to New York City, at age 28, Matta he had created a distinctive and visionary vocabulary of biomorphic shapes swirling around a mysterious and haunting environment. His imaginary multidimensional world was fraught with violent conflict and hectic movements.

Throughout his life he combined the surrealists’ interest in psychic automatism with a predilection for figurative elements, loosely caught in states of flux and crisis. Rich in psychological ambiguity, his work reflects the sense of dislocation and anxiety that contributed to the rise of existentialism after World War II.

Matta he was a major influence on artists such as Arshile Gorky and Robert Motherwell. None other than Duchamp considered it “the deepest painter of his generation“In recent years, political activism occupied much of his energies. He made a series of plays based on the writings of Miguel de Cervantes, Arthur Rimbaud, Alfred Jarry and William Shakespeare.

In 1990, he received the National Art Award; in 1992, he was awarded the Prince of Asturias Award for the Arts and, in 1995, he received the “Praemium Imperiale” painting award from the Japan Art Association.

Matta He died in Civitavecchia (Italy) on November 23, 2002, decreeing in his native country three days of national mourning in his honor