ROBERTO MATTA

His biography is that of a cosmopolitan: born in Santiago, Chile to Spanish-French parents, he lived and worked in South America, France, Mexico, the USA, Italy, Spain and England. In 1934, at his father’s request, he joined Le Corbusier’s office in Paris, but did not pursue a career in architecture; instead, he began painting in 1938 and exhibited at the legendary Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme in the same year. At the end of the 1930s, he emigrated to New York, where he soon had his first solo exhibition at the Julian Levy Gallery. In New York, Matta became a figurehead for the later New York School of Painting in particular, but unlike the representatives of Abstract Expressionism, he never abandoned representationalism for his art.

His work is just as international as his biography: Matta himself coined the term “technique of psychological morphologies”. His paintings always depict a kind of “inner landscape”, which Matta called “inscape”. One searches in vain for a vanishing point in Matta’s painterly cosmos. Transcendence, mysticism and the automatism so important to surrealism are Matta’s constant companions. Technically, the application of paint with a sponge is typical; only then did Matta work on his canvases with a brush. Fluidity and the blasting of boundaries as well as topical political references are—and this continues to make Matta a pillar of contemporary art production—essential conditions of his artistic output. His politically alert mind and his unconditional commitment to an open society also make him appear from today’s perspective as a pioneer of an art that not only demanded the social responsibility of artistic endeavour, but actively lived it.

The exhibition at the Bank Austria Kunstforum Wien presents Matta’s artistic galaxies in seven rooms. The project is being realised in collaboration with the Matta Archives and the Galerie Gmurzynska.

Matta-log, Morphology of Desire, published by Kunstforum Wien on the occasion of the exhibition “Matta,” edited by Fabrice Flahutez.