KunstenaarChileangeb.1911–ov.2002
Roberto Matta
1 actieve items
Architecture trained Matta to think in spatial terms, but it was a chance encounter with Andre Breton in 1937 that redirected him entirely. Breton saw Matta's architectural drawings and urged him toward painting, a transition that within a year produced a body of work unlike anything the Surrealists had seen before. His early canvases, which he called "inscapes," mapped interior psychological states as luminous, churning environments where space behaved like liquid and form dissolved at the edges.
By the time Matta arrived in New York in 1939, his studio had become a pivot point for a generation of American painters trying to break free from Social Realism. Jackson Pollock, Arshile Gorky, Robert Motherwell, and William Baziotes gathered there, absorbing his methods of psychic automatism and his instinct for working at monumental scale. His 1942 painting The Earth Is a Man, now widely considered one of his defining works, preceded and in many ways anticipated the scale and intensity of what would become Abstract Expressionism. Duchamp called Matta "the most profound painter of his generation."
His expulsion from the Surrealist group in 1948, following a bitter controversy involving Gorky's family, did nothing to slow his output. He spent the following decades splitting his time between Europe and Latin America, and his work grew more explicitly political without losing its hallucinatory quality. He was a vocal supporter of Salvador Allende's government in Chile, and after the 1973 coup he channeled his grief and outrage directly into large-scale canvases that mixed allegory with raw figuration. Works like Ojo con el ojo (Beware of the Eye) from this period carry both personal and political weight.
His technical range was extraordinary. Across six decades he moved between oil painting, works on paper, printmaking, and sculpture, always maintaining the sense of figures caught mid-transformation in unstable, pressurized space. The Art Institute of Chicago holds forty works spanning his entire career - among the most complete holdings of his work anywhere. His paintings are also in the Centre Pompidou, the Reina Sofia, MoMA, the Guggenheim, the Metropolitan Museum, and Tate Britain.
On the auction market, Matta's large paintings command serious prices. His record is $5,010,500 for La revolte des contraires (Christie's New York, 2012). Disasters of Mysticism previously set the benchmark at $2.6 million at Sotheby's in 1999 and is now in the Museum of Latin American Art in Buenos Aires. On Auctionist, his 23 listings are dominated by prints and works on paper, with the bulk appearing at Scandinavian houses including Metropol, Bukowskis, and Bruun Rasmussen.