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Roberto MattaHecatombe de Toros1971
1971
About the Item
This artwork titled "Hecatombe de Toros" 1971, is an original color lithograph on Arches paper by renown Chilean artist Roberto Sebastian Matta, 1911-2002. It is hand signed and numbered 43/100 in pencil by the artist. The image size is 17.25 x 23.75 inches, sheet size is 19.25 x 25.5 inches. Printed by Atelier Michel Casse. Referenced and pictured in the artist's catalogues raisonne by Roland Sabatier, Georges Visat, editions Sonet-Visat, plates #249 page 109. It is in excellent condition, has never been framed.
About the artist:
Roberto Antonio Sebastián Matta Echaurren was born on November 11, 1911 in Santiago, Chile. Matta was educated in his native country as an architect and interior designer at the Sacré Coeur Jesuit College and at the Catholic University of Santiago, from 1929-31. In 1933 he became a Merchant Marine, which enabled him to leave Santiago and travel to Europe.
From 1933-34 he worked in Paris at the atelier of famed architect Le Corbusier. At the end of 1934 Matta visited Spain, where he met the poet and playwright Federico García Lorca who introduced Matta to Salvador Dalí. Dalí encouraged him to show some of his drawings to Surrealist leader Andre Breton.
Matta's acquaintance with Dalí and Breton strongly influenced his artistic formation and he officially joined the Surrealists in 1937. He was in London for a short period in 1936 and worked with Walter Gropius and László Moholy-Nagy. Matta's employment with the architects of the Spanish Republican pavilion at the 1937 Paris International Exhibition exposed him to Picasso's powerful painting Guernica, which greatly impressed him and influenced him in his own work.
At this time, he was introduced to the work of Marcel Duchamp, whom he met soon after. He later went to Scandinavia where he met the architect Alvar Aalto and then to Russia where he worked on housing design projects.
The summer of 1938 marked the evolution of Matta's work from drawing to painting. He completed his first oil paintings while in Brittany and working with Gordon Onslow Ford. Forced to leave Europe with the outbreak of war, Matta arrived in New York City in the fall of 1938.
Consistent with his later works and with Surrealist theories of practice, Matta began his exploration of the visionary landscape of the subconscious using color to created energized forms and space. Matta looked to his friend and mentor Yves Tanguy whose works are reminiscent of 15th and 16th century Dutch artists such as Bosch or Bruegel. In addition, both Matta and Tanguy create a universe that is simultaneously fiery & chilly that is often connected to their own social consciousness of the ongoing war in Europe.
Matta's style and willing exploration of the surrealist philosophy of "automatic composition" heavily influenced the development of the New York Abstract Expressionist School and their exploration of Action painting. The 1940s also signified the re-entry of the human figure into his compositions creating a compositional dialogue of Man versus the Machine. The forms he created were organic and existed in symbiotic relationships with machines.
In 1947, Matta was expelled from the surrealists' group, and he returned to Europe. By the 1950s & 60s he established homes in Rome, Paris, and London. He visited Cuba in the 1960s to work with art students. His work of the 1960s tended to have distinct political and spiritual intentions. Much of his work consisted of themes related to political events occurring in such places as Vietnam, Santo Domingo, and Alabama.
The 1960s marked not only a change in Matta's themes, but in his style. He found influences in contemporary culture while remaining close to his Surrealist roots. The idea of automatism was a key element of the Surrealist movement, which emphasized the suppression of conscious control over a composition in order to give free reign to the unconscious imagery and associations. Matta used automatism in a manner that allowed one form to give rise to another until unification was achieved or until further elaboration destroyed the composition. These "chance" compositions were exploited with a fully conscious purpose.
Matta was commissioned to create a large mural for the UNESCO building in Paris in 1956. Major retrospective exhibitions of his work were presented at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1957 and at the Georges Pompidou Center in Paris in 1985. During an interview at the latter show, the artist described his point of view as an interest in "the phenomenon of capturing the spark produced in the act of understanding."
As a Chilean painter, printmaker and draftsman, Matta left Chile as a young man and did not like to be thought of as a "Latin American" artist. He was certainly one of the few Surrealist artists to take on political, social, and spiritual themes directly and without abandoning the biomorphic mutations he was known for and without resorting to social realism. Matta died in Civitavecchia, Italy on November 23, 2002.
Select Museum Collections:
Art Institute of Chicago, IL
Museum of Modern Art, NY
Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice
Art Museum of the Americas, Washington, DC
Fundación Proa, Buenos Aires
Fundación Telefónica, Chile
Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Chile
Tate Gallery, London
- Creator:Roberto Matta (1911-2002, Chilean)
- Creation Year:1971
- Dimensions:Height: 19.25 in (48.9 cm)Width: 25.5 in (64.77 cm)Depth: 0.01 in (0.26 mm)
- Medium:
- Movement & Style:
- Period:
- Condition:
- Gallery Location:San Francisco, CA
- Reference Number:
Roberto Matta
“The function of art,” the Surrealist Roberto Matta once stated, “is to unveil the enormous economic, cultural and emotional forces that materially interact in our lives and that constitute the real space in which we live.” In his paintings, Matta sought to expose those forces through the Surrealist practice of automatism, creating work in a free-associative state intended to conjure the unconscious.
After studying architecture in his native Chile, Matta, then 22, chose to pursue the field in Paris, where he mingled with stars of the avant-garde like Gertrude Stein, Salvador Dalí and Walter Gropius. In the late 1930s, he abandoned Paris, together with his job at Le Corbusier’s studio and (for a time) his career, for modern art’s new epicenter, New York City. There, he became a colleague of art legends like Marcel Duchamp and Arshile Gorky.
Although celebrated primarily for his work as a painter, Matta was an equally talented furniture designer. His furniture pieces, like his artworks, are the stuff of dreams. The back of his totem chair, for example, is composed of smiling, cartoonish creatures stacked on top of each other. In his MAgriTTA armchair, the top half of a plush green apple sticks out of large black bowler in homage to its namesake, the Belgian Surrealist René Magritte.
But perhaps the piece that most truly embodies his artistic philosophy is his 1966 Mallite modular system: a collection of spongy, undulating sofas and lounges that can be fitted together to form a puzzle-like room divider. The work, an original edition of which is in MoMA’s permanent collection, has in recent decades been a hard-to-find collectors’ item — until 2019, when Italian design brand Paradisoterrestre issued a reedition, available through Duplex.
Browse Roberto Matta's paintings and furniture designs on 1stDibs.
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