Roberto Matta (1911-2002) - Altra Euridice

Rara Lithography, Prova D'Autore specimen, in excellent condition.

Roberto Sebastián Antonio Matta Echaurren (Santiago de Chile, November 11, 1911 – Civitavecchia, November 23, 2002) was a Chilean architect and painter. Matta was born in Santiago on November 11, 1911, to 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. Of him, in 1944 Breton wrote: “Matta is the one who most faithfully follows his own star, perhaps on the best path to reach the supreme secret: the control of fire.” He is 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 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 (Church of Santa Maria in Castello) and in Naples (Phlegraean Fields); then completed (three modules) and exhibited in Bologna (Galleria d’arte moderna), Terni (Piazza del Comune), La Spezia (Allende Center), Florence (San Niccolò ramps–Fort 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 painter’s Armenian wife. Moving to Rome in 1949, he would become an important meeting point between Abstract Expressionism and the nascent Italian abstraction. Leaving Rome in 1954, he moved to Paris, while maintaining a close link with Italy. From the sixties he elected Tarquinia as his parallel residence, settling in a former convent of the Passionist friars.

In the early nineties Matta designed a series of five obelisk-totem-antennas, ten meters tall and made of metal, which he called Cosmo-Now, intending them to be installed on each of the continents as symbols 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).