Matta, Roberto (1911–2002)

Chilean-born French painter. He was a leading figure, along with André Masson, of surrealist-inspired automatic painting, in which images are allowed to flow from the unconscious through the hand directly onto paper or canvas. His expressed intention in much of his work was an attempt to define the anxieties of the age through the force and motion of forms, as in Years of Fear (1942; Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, New York).

Trained as an architect, Matta spent World War II in New York where he met and was influenced by French artist Marcel Duchamp. His first mature work of the 1940s explodes with bursts of colour and skeins of indefinable organic or mechanistic form, generally hurtling or floating in cosmic space. His style became more figurative and calligraphic in the 1980s.

Matta's one-man exhibitions included those at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Nationalgalerie, Berlin; the Kestner-Gesellschaft, Hanover; the Hayward Gallery, London; Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Museo de Bellas Artes, Santiago, Chile; and Yokohama Museum, Japan. A Matta retrospective was presented at the Centro Cultural Caixa in Barcelona and the Museo Nacional de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid in 1999.