Roberto Sebastian Matta Echauren

The Chilean painter and sculptor Roberto Sebastian Echaurren Matta was born in Santiago de Chile on November 11, 1911. In Santiago he studied architecture at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile before going to Europe in 1933, where he made several trips through European countries. He earned his living by working in Le Corbusier's studio. In Paris, Roberto Matta begins to work as a visual artist and belongs to the circle of surrealist artists and poets around André Breton, Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst and others. From 1939 to 1945 Roberto Sebastian Echaurren Matta lived mostly in the USA. Here he is friends with Marcel Duchamp, Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko and joins the New York avant-garde artists, in 1941 he travels with Robert Motherwell to Mexico. From 1950 to 1954 Roberto Matta lives for the first time for a long time in Rome, then again in Paris, before he finally settles in Rome. Fantastic mixed creatures and psychological morphologies. Always politically interested, Roberto Matta follows with commitment the political world events as well as the political turmoil in his home country Chile. He opposes the Vietnam War, meets Fidel Castro in Cuba in the 1970s, reveres Chilean President Salvador Allende, and clashes with the subsequent dictator Pinochet. As an artist, Roberto Matta wrestles above all with himself. His fantastic painting between figuration and abstraction shows stick figures, grimacing chimeras and technoid monsters, composed of machines and insects. Roberto Sebastian Echaurren Matta describes his pictorial worlds as "psychological morphologies," which is also the title of a work from 1939, as visual analogies for the artist's psyche. Roberto Matta's graphic work also shows the Surrealist's effort to capture the spontaneous stroke or flow of thought, analogous to the Écriture automatique in literature. The colorful, sometimes shrill colors and above all the beauty of his symbolic figurative style in some of his works are reminiscent of Salvador Dalí. Surreal pictorial worlds. In 1938 Roberto Sebastian Echaurren Matta participated in the "Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme" in Paris. In 1940 the Julien Levy Gallery shows him in New York. In 1955 his works are shown at the III Biennial in Sao Paulo. In 1959, 1964 as well as in 1977 Roberto Matta takes part in Documenta II, III and 6 in Kassel. One of his major works is the mural Roberto Matta painted for the UNESCO building in Paris in 1956. In 1957 the first retrospective of Roberto Matta's work was held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the first retrospective exhibition in Europe was held at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm in 1959. Roberto Matta died on November 23, 2002 in Civitavecchia, near Rome.