The Prince of Asturias Foundation
Roberto Sebastián Antonio Matta, known as Robero Matta, was born in Chile in 1911. He graduated in Architecture from the Catholic University of Santiago and travelled to Europe in 1933, meeting the avant-garde architects Le Corbusier and Alvar Aalto. Roberto Matta’s first works were exhibited in the Spanish Pavilion at the International Exhibition of Paris. It was in Paris that he met Magritte, Picasso –who was exhibiting his “Guernica” at the time– and Miró, whose painting techniques he was greatly interested in. He later met André Breton through Dalí and Lorca in 1938 and came to form part of the Surrealist movement, in whose magazine, Minotaure, he published several articles. Ten years later, he abandoned the Surrealist movement and staged an important joint exhibition with Asger Jorn.
After living in Rome for four years, he returned to Paris in 1954. It was in Paris in 1956 that he produced his magnificent mural “Three Constellation Beings Facing the Fire” for UNESCO. The following year, the New York Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) organised a retrospective exhibition of his work, which toured to Minneapolis and Boston.
Following several trips to Cuba, he chaired the 1968 Havana Cultural Conference, where he delivered his lecture “Inner Guerrilla Warfare”. In 1970, he visited several Arab nations to meet artists and intellectuals from these countries and produced paintings for the Angola liberation movement. That same year, he also visited Peru and Chile, at the invitation of President Allende, and worked on collective murals with the “Ramona Parra” Brigade.
In 1970, the Berlin National Gallery, the New York Museum of Modern Art and various other cities organised several retrospective exhibitions of his works.
During the 1970’s and 80’s, he showed widely in the most important European and American cities, including New York, Rome, Paris, Milan, Venice, Mexico City, Bogota and Caracas. He died on 23rd November 2002, aged 91.
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