Matta exhibition at Bucerius Forum, Hamburg

Matta. Fictions
Bucerius Forum, Hamburg, Germany
22 September 2012 – 6 january 2013

For the first time in decades the work of Matta (1911 – 2002) will be shown in Germany. The Bucerius Kunst Forum in Hamburg presents around 40 mostly large-scale works by this Chilean-born artist in a focused retrospective. The exhibition Matta. Fictions stretches from Matta’s beginnings as a Surrealist through to his panoramic paintings of the 1990s.

Matta was one of the most influential painters of the 20th century. His works can be seen in museums around the world. He was in close contact with Surrealists such as Dalí, André Breton and Marcel Duchamp, with whom he began exhibiting in 1938. Trained as an architect, Matta developed his ideas on the relationship of space to human beings while working at the Paris studio of Le Corbusier. In the 1940s, while living in exile in New York City, Matta anticipated important developments in Abstract Expressionism. After the Second World War, his machine figures reflected political and social events of the day. Matta’s painting style shifts between figuration and abstraction, creating cosmic fictional spaces that reflect contemporary history. His often overwhelmingly large paintings anticipated the fantastic worlds found in works of science fiction and computer games.

This exhibition, which will subsequently be shown at the Frieder Burda Museum in Baden-Baden, illustrates the cosmopolitan life Matta led between Santiago de Chile, Paris, Rome and New York and demonstrates his amazing relevance to contemporary painting.

Matta. Fictions brings together works from all of Matta’s creative periods, including three-dimensional installations in several parts that encompass the view and pull him or her into the fictional space. Matta’s architectural vision finds its expression in the space between the image and the viewer in such installations. The curving walls of the exhibition will reflect his concept of image space which is based on the organic curves and hollows found in the human body.