Roberto Matta
Chilean architect turned Surrealist, who painted psychological space as if it were weather.
Roberto Matta was born in Santiago in 1911, qualified as an architect and worked in Le Corbusier's Paris office before Dali and Breton drew him into Surrealism in 1937. He invented what he called inscapes — vast, luminous, deep-space landscapes of the mind, painted in thin washes and scraped lines, with no horizon and no fixed scale. He spent the war years in New York, where his automatism was directly influential on Gorky, Motherwell and the young Abstract Expressionists, before being expelled from the Surrealist group in 1948. He worked in Italy and France until his death in 2002.
The 1938 to 1947 period leads the market by a considerable margin; Matta then worked for another fifty years at high volume, and the later output is a much broader and more modest field. Separating the two is the substance of most valuations. He is significantly forged, especially in works on paper, and the estate archives in Paris and Santiago are the references. The prints and the crayon-and-pencil drawings are numerous. Prices are set in New York, Paris and the Latin American sales.
If you own a work by Roberto Matta
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