Given his significance as a member of the Surrealist group and his huge influence on the development of American Abstract Expressionism, Matta (Santiago, Chile, 1911 - Tarquinia, Italy, 2002) is one of the most significant figures of 20th-century art. He was a visionary and controversial artist, the forerunner of the relationships between art and science and nature, and championed the overriding role of art in human development.
This exhibition marks the centenary of Matta's birth and aims to present a complete overview of his work through an account of the most significant landmarks of his career. To this end it brings together 32 large-format paintings (some measuring more than ten metres) dated between 1939 and 1999, selected by historian Marga Paz. It represents the most significant retrospective of Matta's work staged in Spain for more than a decade.
Matta's painting maintained figurative reference points throughout his career. In the mid 1930s he embarked on the path towards abstraction, placing biomorphic figures within a kind of internal landscape. In the 1940s his idiom became more abstract, adopting elements from the natural world, science, mathematics and geometry. From 1944 onwards the dramatic events of the Second World War aroused his conscience, marking a break with abstraction as he painted humanoids in nightmare scenarios.
This dual tension between figuration and abstraction and between the reflection of inner states and the outer world characterizes Matta's entire career, although in the middle of the past century his concerns focused on human behaviour and violence, in contrast with the abstraction and informalism which predominated at the time. In the works from this period, laden with anguish, violence and sexuality, we also find the influence of primitive art and the art of ancient civilisations, anthropology and mythology, in a broad iconography ranging from New Guinea to pre-Columbian America. This fascination with primitive art also took the form of a remarkable collection which Matta assembled over the years.
This, together with the poetic airs of his compositions, an obsessive dominion over pictorial space and the expansive and dynamic use of colour, make up Matta's individual and highly unconventional concept of painting. Strange figures, humanoids and automata, populate a complex, surreal or imaginary space, constituting an enigma which seems to appeal to our subconscious, while at the same time it reveals the tensions of contemporary humanity.