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Roberto Sebastian Antonio Matta Echaurren was born in Santiago, Chile in 1911. He studied architecture at the Universidad Catolica in Santiago. In 1933 Matta traveled to Paris and worked for two years as a draftsman in the Paris studio of famed architect Le Corbusier. While visiting his aunt in Madrid, he met Federico Garcia Lorca and Pablo Neruda. Neruda introduced Matta to Salvador Dali and Andre Breton. Impressed by Matta's drawings, Breton invited him to join the Surrealist group in 1937. Influenced by his association with the Surrealists and by Marcel Duchamp's theories of movement and process, Matta began to explore the realm of the subconscious and to develop an imagery of cosmic creation and destruction. His early works, the Psychological Morphologies and the Inscape series, were organic in style and content. By 1939 the war in Europe drove Matta to exile in New York, where he was an important influence on the young New York School artists, especially in his use of automatist techniques. In 1940 he held his first solo exhibition at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York City. A 1941 trip to Mexico with his wife and his friend Robert Motherwell intensified his interest in the pre-Columbian heritage of Latin America. In 1942 Matta was included in the New York exhibitions Artists in Exile at the Pierre Matisse Gallery and The First Papers of Surrealism at the Whitelaw-Reid Mansion. In the mid-1940s his early abstractions gave way to paintings in which mechanical and insect-like shapes float and collide in a cosmic space charged with dynamic tension. In 1948, Matta returned to Europe and broke with the Surrealist movement. He settled in Paris in 1954. During the 1960s and 1970s Matta traveled to Cuba, South America, Egypt, and Africa. Although known primarily as a painter, Matta has also explored the media of sculpture, ceramics, and tapestry. Matta's one person exhibitions include those at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Nationalgalerie, Berlin, the Kestner-Gesellschaft, Hanover, the Hayward Gallery, London, Musee National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, Museo de Bellas Artes, Santiago, Chile, and. Museo Yokohama, Japan. His work has been included in The Latin-American Collection of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1943; The Emergent Decade, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1965; Art of Latin America since Independence, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, 1966; Art in Latin America: The Modern Era, 1820-1980, Hayward Gallery, London, 1989; and Crosscurrents of Modernism: Four Latin American Pioneers Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC, 1992. A Matta retrospective was presented at the Centro Cultural Caixa in Barcelona and the Museo Nacional de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid in 1999.
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