Chilean
Chilean painter born in Santiago de Chile. Attended the Sacred Heart School and the Catholic University in Santiago de Chile. Finished studying architecture in 1931 and went to live in Paris in 1933. Whilst there he visited Germany and Austria. From 1935 to 1937 he worked as a draughtsman in Le Corbusier's studio. Introduced to Dali and other surrealists in 1936. He showed three drawings in the Surrealist exhibition at the Galerie Wildenstein in Paris. In 1939 he went to live in America and between 1941 and 1948 had regular exhibitions at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York. In 1948 he returned to Europe. Lived in Rome from 1950-54. In 1956 he painted a mural for the UNESCO building in Paris. In 1962 he won the Marzotto prize.

Early in his career Matta used a form of automatic writing developed by the European Surrealists in the 1920's. His early paintings were agitated, psychologically motivated structures, and demonstrated their strange relationship to external reality. Matta met A. Gorky and the American Surrealists in 1939-40 and this combined with his discovery of early Mexican culture paved the way for his large scale pictures. Many of Matta's works of this time were inspired by a mystical belief in the essential unity of all cosmic events. He began to create a pictorial mythology for our own technological age. Matta was fascinated by the precision and speed of automated processes.

Between 1950 and 1960 Matta's use of colour became shrill, vitriolic and luminous with sharply defined pictorial objects in the paintings. Cosmonaut apparatuses, astral configurations and strange hybrid creatures, half human and half insect- were depicted in the midst of endless space. Matta's portrayal of space expresses the limitless expansion of all human drives and constitutes a truly imaginative response to man's ventures in space.

LIT:
Mathematique sensible- Architecture du Temps, R.S. Matta, Minotaure, Paris 1938
Matta and the New Reality, Pierre Mabille, Horizon XX, London, September 1949
Matta, William Rubin, Museum of Modern Art Bulletin XXV, No.1, New York, 1957