PIASA is organizing a sale of modern and contemporary art on Wednesday, December 7th.
The artist creates a world which is "extra-real", pushing the borders of the imagination to see the world through the walls of consciousness. Matta's works depict an imaginary world in motion through drawn images composed like a storyboard or a science fiction comic book. His expansion of the dimensions of perception has been summed up by William Rubin, the pivotal curator of the Museum of Modern Art, who wrote: "Matta has become the only painter since Duchamp to explore entirely new possibilities in illusionistic space."
Beyond being a major avant-garde painter, Roberto Matta announced in his works the avant-garde of tomorrow, influencing countless other modern masters. His monumental and abstract paintings made with rags as often as with brushes, foreshadowing the prefigured the emerging abstract expressionist movement. The process of automatic painting that Matta helped to develop undoubtedly influenced the impulsive pictorial gestures of American painters of the time. In New York, he passed on these techniques to figures such as Robert Motherwell and Jackson Pollock, the latter of which owes his surrealist education to Roberto Matta, as well as his decision to paint on monumental canvases and his introduction to his patron Peggy Guggenheim. His primordial influence on the New York School can be summarized - and is echoed by many others - by Motherwell's statement that Matta "was the most energetic, poetic, charming, and brilliant young artist I have ever met."
Roberto Matta, Witnesses of the Universe, Gmurzynska Gallery, June 10 - August 31, 2022
