Sebastian Matta Biography
Sebastian Matta (1991 - 2002), born Roberto Sebastián Antonio Matta Echaurren was born in 1911 in Santiago, Chile. After studying architecture at the Universidad Católica in Santiago, Matta went to Paris in 1934 to work as an apprentice to the architect Le Corbusier. In the mid-1930s he met the poet Federico Garcia Lorca, as well as André Breton and Salvador Dalí. He left Le Corbusier's studio in 1937 and joined the Surrealist movement. In the same year Matta's drawings were included in the Surrealist exhibition at the Galerie Wildenstein in Paris. In 1938 he began to paint in oils, creating a series of fantastic landscapes that he called "inscapes" or "psychic morphologies". Matta fled Europe for New York in 1939, where he associated with other Surrealist émigrés including Breton, Max Ernst, André Masson, and Yves Tanguy. The Julien Levy Gallery in New York presented his first solo painting exhibition in 1940, and he was included in the Artists in Exile exhibition at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York in 1942. During the 1940s Matta's painting anticipated many innovations of Expressionism abstract and influenced many artists of the so-called New York School, especially his friends, Arshile Gorky and Robert Motherwell. The new generation of artists considers him a leading figure of contemporary painting from which to draw inspiration. He broke with the Surrealists in 1948 and returned to Europe, settling in Rome in 1953. In 1956 the artist executed a mural for the UNESCO Palace in Paris. A major retrospective of his work was held at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1957, then presented at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. Matta died in Civitavecchia, Rome, on 23 November 2002.
