Roberto Matta
24 Feb 2024 - 2 Jun 2024

Roberto Matta (1911-2002) is considered one of the most visionary painters of the 20th century. He not only left his mark on art history, but also significantly influenced numerous artists, including Arshile Gorky, Dorothea Tanning, Jackson Pollock and Robert Motherwell, or brought them to art in the first place.

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, he joined Le Corbusier's office in Paris at his father's request, 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 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 Roberto Matta Estate.

You can visit the exhibition at the Kunstforum Wien from 23 February to 2 June 2024.

Photo credits: Kunstforum Wien