Lot n° 365
Estimation :
15000 - 25000
EUR
Result with fees
Result
: 25 760EUR
Roberto MATTA (1911-2002)
Composition, 1969.
Oil... - Lot 365 - Coutau-Bégarie
Roberto MATTA (1911-2002)
Composition, 1969.
Oil on canvas.
Signed lower right.
81 x 65 cm
Born in Santiago de Chile in 1911, Matta belongs to the second generation of Surrealist painters. He emigrated to Paris in 1933 and was accepted by André Breton in 1938 after his first meeting with the latter. He was invited to participate in the group's meetings. The meeting with Yves Tanguy seems to have been particularly important as well as the adoption of the process of automatic writing which frees the expression of the imagination. From the beginning of the war he went into exile in the United States and participated in the mythical exhibition "Artists in Exile", exhibited at Julien Lévy, Pierre Matisse and Peggy Guggenheim. Thanks to his charisma and his mastery of English, he conquered the New York artistic milieu and was a determining factor in the birth of American surrealism, as well as in the beginnings of the abstract expressionism of Pollock, Baziotes and Gorky.
Our painting, executed around 1972, illustrates the profound surrealist continuity of Matta's art. Daniel Cordier, the painter's gallery owner in Paris in the 1950s, but also a writer and critic, sheds light on the automatism practiced here, a method of access to the artist's own psychic depth: "With this process (automatism), he extracts from the consciousness the figures that slumber there. Thus, he created in some years a repertory of unpublished forms (...), science-fiction for some, settlement of Martians for the others, X-rays of psychological fluids for the author. His first wealth is the variety of interpretations he proposes; his talent is the creation of a disconcerting climate, neither fauna nor flora, neither atmosphere nor space, neither lighting nor light, but always both at the same time, intimately melted in each canvas.
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