Roberto Matta (1911-2002) - Altra Euridice

Rare lithograph, Artist's Proof, in excellent condition.
Roberto Sebastián Antonio Matta Echaurren (Santiago, Chile, November 11, 1911 – Civitavecchia, November 23, 2002) was a Chilean architect and painter. Matta was born in Santiago on November 11, 1911, into a family of Spanish, Basque, and French origins. 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 focused on psychological morphologies. In 1944 Breton wrote of him: “Matta is the one who most faithfully follows his own star, perhaps the best path to reach the supreme secret: the control of fire.” He was constantly on the move, from Scandinavia, where he met Alvar Aalto, to London, where he met Henry Moore, Roland Penrose, and René Magritte. In Venice he met De Chirico. Between 1973 and 1976 he designed and built, with painter and sculptor Bruno Elisei, Autoapocalypse, a house built from recycled old cars as a provocation against consumerism. The first two modules were exhibited for the first time in Tarquinia (Church of S. Maria in Castello) and in Naples (Campi Flegrei); later completed (three modules), it was shown in Bologna (Galleria d'arte moderna), Terni (Piazza del Comune), La Spezia (Allende Center), Florence (San Niccolò ramps – Forte Belvedere). In 1985 the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris dedicated a major retrospective to him, and in the same year Chris Marker dedicated a documentary to him, Matta ’85. At the beginning of World War II he fled to New York with many other avant-garde artists. Here he exerted a decisive influence on some young artists such as Jackson Pollock and Arshile Gorky. He was expelled from the Surrealist group (in which he was later readmitted), accused of having indirectly provoked Gorky’s suicide due to his relationship with the wife of the Armenian painter. Moving to Rome in 1949, he became an important link between Abstract Expressionism and the emerging Italian abstraction. Leaving Rome in 1954, he moved to Paris, while maintaining a close bond with Italy. From the 1960s he made Tarquinia his parallel residence, settling in an ex-convent of the Passionist friars. In the early nineties Matta designed a series of five obelisk-totem-antennae, ten meters tall and made of metal, which he called Cosmo-Now, intended to be installed on each continent as a symbol of harmony and planetary peace; the location chosen for Europe was the Italian town of Gubbio, associated with Saint Francis of Assisi. His works are exhibited in the world’s most important museums (London, New York, Venice, Chicago, Rome, Washington, Paris, Tokyo).