Author Description

Matta, born in Santiago, Chile in 1911, is a seminal figure in the canon of modern art. He was invited to join the Surrealists in 1937 by André Breton, who credited Matta for his discovery of new regions of space previously unseen in the field of art. With the onset of World War II, Matta left Europe for New York, where his introduction of automatist methods was influential to the development of Abstract Expressionism. His early works, referred to as "psychological morphologies" explore states of the human subconscious. Matta's reinvention of pictorial space was fueled by a deep interest in architecture and science, especially physics. He rejected a fixed vantage point in order to interpret the fluctuating energy in the universe, and sought to transform the traditional understanding of time and space. The exhibition will present a selection of paintings and drawings from the 1950s and 1960s, when Matta was entering the very international second half of his life, living first in Rome and later in Paris. In the 1960s, Matta visited Cuba amidst the early optimism of its revolution, and traveled to his native Chile, where he painted a mural for Santiago's Universidad Técnica. At this time in his career, Matta was moving away from a purely introspective focus and creating works that include aspects of the external world and postwar society. In 1957, Matta was commissioned by UNESCO to create a large painting at their world headquarters in Paris. The mural, Les doutes des trois mondes, was painted in 1958 and uses scattered planes to convey expanding space, a compositional device first seen in Matta's works of the late 1940s. Included in the exhibition is L'Impensable, a sculpture that Matta designed at the time of the UNESCO mural and created in 1959. The cast bronze sculpture speaks to the artist's ability to work fluidly across diverse media. Exhibition: Pace Gallery, New York, USA (06.11.2015-09.01.2016).