The Chilean painter Roberto Matta was born in Santiago, Chile, in 1911 and passed away in Civitavecchia, Italy, in 2002.
He is the most famous artist of Chile and one of the most important figures of Surrealism and Expressionist Abstraction in the 20th century. He studied architecture and interior design. He traveled to Peru, Panama, the USA, and Europe, where he came into contact with major contemporary creators, including Arshile Gorky, René Magritte, and Salvador Dalí. In Paris, André Breton introduced him to the Surrealist circle. There, Matta collaborated with the magazine “Minotaure” and met prominent artists such as Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, and Le Corbusier. Despite joining Surrealism relatively late in 1938, Matta breathed new life into the movement. He believed that utopianism and the visual arts could depict time, change, and the evolution of our inner psychological landscape. For this reason, Breton, who both admired and influenced him, characterized him as a “three-dimensional artist who created landscapes with multiple horizons”.
Between 1938 and 1948, he lived in the USA, creating numerous series of “inscapes” in oil paintings. The difficult years of the 1940s and 1950s are distinguished by his more restless, turbulent compositions, and by 1960, he frequently added clay to his canvases. He created biomorphic entities by merging organic and cosmic animal elements, leading his work toward Expressionist Abstraction. His relationship with the wife of Arshile Gorky was considered a factor that drove the latter to suicide, which led to Matta’s expulsion from the Surrealist group. In addition to painting, he engaged with various other art forms, including ceramics, photography, and video.