Sebastian Matta

Roberto Sebastián Matta (1911-2002) was a Chilean painter, an important exponent of surrealism. Trained as an architect, he arrived in Europe in 1934 to work in the Parisian studio of Le Corbusier. Having remained involved in the lively avant-garde circles, Matta met intellectuals such as Federico García Lorca, Salvador Dalì and André Breton, the animator of the surrealist movement to which Matta decided to join. His activity as a painter began in 1938 with the series of Psychological Morphologies, explorations of his unconscious in full line with the surrealist poetics, populated by fluctuating phantasmal forms. With the outbreak of World War II Matta moved to New York, where he remained in contact with the exiled Surrealist community while mentoring nascent Abstract Expressionist painters such as Arshile Gorky and Jackson Pollock. After the war he returned to Europe, dividing himself between Rome and Paris where he continued his aesthetic research poised between abstract art and disturbing anthropomorphic figures. Starting in the 1960s, Dino Gavina convinced him to join the Ultramobile project, in which big names in art were involved in the creation of alienating surrealist furnishings. From this collaboration come iconic products such as the MAgriTTA pouf (now re-edited by Gufram), the Malitte modular seat or the Margarita armchair (both today in the catalog of the Paradisterrestre gallery, direct heir to Dino Gavina's Simon).