Roberto Sebastian Antonio Matta Artwork valuations, appraisals and auction estimates

Roberto Sebastián Antonio Matta Echaurren (Santiago, Chile, 11 November 1911 – Civitavecchia, 23 November 2002) was a Chilean architect and painter. Matta was born in Santiago de Chile on 11 November 1911 to a family of Spanish, Basque and French origins. Read the full biography

Roberto Sebastian Antonio Matta Biography

Roberto Sebastián Antonio Matta Echaurren (Santiago, Chile, 11 November 1911 – Civitavecchia, 23 November 2002) was a Chilean architect and painter. Matta was born in Santiago de Chile on 11 November 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 meets André Breton and Salvador Dalí and adheres to surrealism, developing a painting focused on psychological morphologies. In 1944 Breton wrote about him: «Matta is the one who most keeps faith with his own star, who is perhaps on the best path to arrive at the supreme secret: the control of fire». He is constantly on the move, from Scandinavia, where he meets Alvar Aalto, to London, where he meets 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 Autoapocalipse, 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 S. Maria in Castello) and in Naples (Campi Flegrei), then completed (three modules) they were exhibited in Bologna (Gallery of Modern Art), Terni (Piazza of the Municipality), La Spezia (Allende centre), Florence (San Niccolò-Forte Belvedere ramps). In 1985 the Center 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 the Second World War he fled to New York together 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 removed from the surrealist group (to which he was later readmitted), accused of having indirectly caused Gorky's suicide due to his relationship with the Armenian painter's wife. Having moved to Rome in 1949, he became an important point of connection between abstract expressionism and the nascent Italian abstractionism. After leaving Rome in 1954, he moved to Paris, maintaining a close link with Italy. Since the 1960s he has 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 obelisks-totem-antennas, 10 meters high and made of metal, which he called Cosmo-Now, with the intention of being installed in each of the continents as a symbol of harmony and planetary peace; the location chosen for Europe was the Italian town of Gubbio, linked to Francis of Assisi. His works are exhibited in the most important museums in the world (London, New York, Venice, Chicago, Rome, Washington, Paris, Tokyo).