Roberto Matta

Born in Santiago, Chile, Matta studied architecture before moving in 1933 to Paris, where he worked with the architect Le Corbusier (1887–1965). In 1937, Matta turned definitively to painting and to Surrealism. Along with other Surrealists forced to leave Paris during World War II, Matta spent the 1940s in New York, socializing in Modernist art circles and teaching American artists informally about automatism, a Surrealist writing method used to access the unconscious. Matta had adapted this technique to painting in order to reveal mental images never before seen in reality. Embracing spontaneity, he used thinned paints to encourage accidents and dripping on his canvases. He remained in New York until 1948, when he moved to France and Italy, continuing to exhibit frequently in Europe and the United States. He produced murals for public commissions in Europe and South America, as well as other large-scale paintings, print portfolios, drawings, and sculpture.

Matta’s Cosmicstrip series is a play on “comic book.” One can read these works like one would a comic, with each rendering a new segment of narrative. The shapes develop as they repeat, prompting the viewer to look for changes between each version. Sometimes there are observable differences, while at other moments the viewer encounters the same object and is forced to consider what Matta wanted to convey in this uniformity.