"I am interested only in the unknown and I work for my own astonishment." - Roberto Matta
Roberto Matta (1911–2002) was a Chilean painter who became one of the leading figures of Surrealism. Born in Santiago, he studied architecture at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile before moving to Europe in 1933. In Paris, he worked in Le Corbusier’s studio, but his encounters with artists and writers soon redirected his career towards painting.
In 1934, Matta travelled to Spain, where he met Federico García Lorca and Salvador Dalí. Through Dalí, he was introduced to André Breton, who welcomed him into the Surrealist movement in 1937. That year, Matta also worked on the Spanish Republican Pavilion at the Paris International Exposition, where he saw Picasso’s Guernica. He participated in the International Surrealist Exhibition at the Galerie Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1938. His early paintings explored what he called psychological morphologies.
With the outbreak of the Second World War, Matta moved to New York in 1939, joining a circle of European Surrealists in exile. His first solo exhibition in the United States took place at the Julien Levy Gallery in 1940. He subsequently exhibited at the Pierre Matisse Gallery, including in Artists in Exile in 1942. In New York, he became closely associated with Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock and Robert Motherwell, introducing younger American painters to Surrealist automatism. A visit to Mexico in 1941, where he encountered the monumental work of Mexican muralists, further influenced the scale of his paintings.
Matta was expelled from the Surrealist group in 1948 and returned to Europe, living between Paris and Italy. He continued to exhibit internationally, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York organised a major retrospective of his work in 1957. In later decades, his art became increasingly engaged with political struggle and human society. He received the Prince of Asturias Award for the Arts in 1992 and the Praemium Imperiale in 1995. He died in Civitavecchia, Italy, in 2002.