About the artist
Born in Santiago, Chile, in 1912, Sebastian Matta moved to France in 1935, where he worked in the studio of the modernist architect Le Corbusier before he abandoned his career in architecture to become an artist. In 1936 Matta began to draw extensively but it was not until after he was invited to join the surrealists by Andre Breton, the leader of the surrealist movement, that he produced his first painting in 1938. Matta’s arrival in New York in 1939 marks the beginning of a pivotal time in the history of American art. His work from this period had a significant impact on many American artists, including those who later became known as abstract expressionists. He spent most of his life living and working in Europe. Today he splits his time between Europe, New York, and South America.

During his years in America, Matta’s interaction with an older generation of European artists in exile in New York and a younger generation of American painters, who would later become known as the New York School, contributed to the development of abstract painting in the 1940s, a period during which Matta created some of his most significant paintings and drawings. His work later influenced painters like Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, and Willem De Kooning.

Many of Matta’s key early works are featured in the exhibition, such as Invasion of Night (1941), The Earth is a Man (1942), The Onyx of Electra (1944), and X-pace and The Ego (1945) from public and private collections from around the world. Matta was occupied by metaphysical and transcendental themes of the universe during this period, including birth, death, and rebirth.

Matta arrived in New York in 1939 from France. He met Arshile Gorky and the American Surrealists in 1939-40 and this combined with his discovery of early Mexican culture paved the way for his large-scale pictures. Many of Matta’s works of this time were inspired by a mystical belief in the essential unity of all cosmic events. He created a pictorial mythology for the technological age. Matta’s work, together with his fluent command of English, strengthened his influence at a time when younger artists were struggling to redefine abstract painting.

Early in his career Matta used a form of automatic writing developed by the European Surrealists in the 1920s. His early paintings included agitated, psychologically motivated images that attempted to convey a strange relationship to external reality. Matta was fascinated by the precision and speed of automated processes.

* This text was reproduced with the permission of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles.