Roberto Matta (1911-2002) - Variante

Matta was born in Santiago de Chile on November 11, 1911, to a family of Spanish, Basque, and French origins[1]. After studying architecture, in 1934 he moved to Paris, where he worked with Le Corbusier and came into contact with intellectuals such as Rafael Alberti and Federico García Lorca. He met André Breton and Salvador Dalí and joined Surrealism, developing a painting centered on psychological morphologies.
About him, in 1944 Breton wrote: “Matta is the one who most faithfully keeps faith with his own star, which is perhaps on the best path to reaching the supreme secret: the control of fire.” [2] He was constantly in motion, from Scandinavia, where he met Alvar Aalto, to London, where he met Henry Moore, Roland Penrose and René Magritte. In Venice he met Giorgio de Chirico. [3]
Roberto Matta, Three Figures, 1958c, M.T. Abraham Center for the Visual Arts.
At the beginning of World War II, he fled to New York together with many other avant-garde artists. There he exercised a decisive influence on some young artists such as Jackson Pollock and Arshile Gorky. He was expelled from the Surrealist group (in which, however, he was subsequently readmitted), accused of having indirectly caused Gorky’s suicide because of his relationship with the Armenian painter’s wife.
Having moved to Rome in 1949, he would become an important liaison between Abstract Expressionism and the nascent Italian abstraction. Leaving Rome in 1954, he moved to Paris, maintaining a close connection with Italy. From the late sixties he chose Tarquinia as his parallel residence, settling in a former convent of the Passionist friars.
Between 1973 and 1976 he designed and built, with the painter and sculptor Bruno Elisei, the Autoapocalypse, a house built by recycling old cars, as a provocation against consumerism. The first two modules were exhibited for the first time in Tarquinia (Chiesa di Santa Maria in Castello) and in Naples (Campi Flegrei), then completed (three modules) they were exhibited in Bologna (Galleria d'arte moderna), Terni (piazza del Comune), La Spezia (centro Allende), Florence (rampe di San Niccolò-Forte Belvedere). In 1985 the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris dedicated a large retrospective to him, and in the same year Chris Marker paid him homage in a documentary, Matta '85.
In the early 1990s, Matta designed a series of five obelisk-totem antennas, ten meters tall and made of metal, which he called Cosmo-Now[5], with the aim of installing them on each continent as a symbol of concord and planetary peace; the location chosen for Europe was the Italian town of Gubbio, linked to Saint Francis of Assisi.
His works are exhibited in the world's most important museums (London, New York, Venice, Chicago, Rome, Washington, Paris, Tokyo).
The work for sale is an etching–aquatint created in Paris in 1974 by the distinguished Stamperia "George Visat"; it is listed in MATTA, Catalogue raisonné de l'œuvre gravée (1973–1974) no. 353.
Edition of only 100 copies worldwide, e.g. 46/100