Roberto Matta

Starting in the 1950s, the artist began to express a growing interest in the political-social events of the world and, particularly, in the Latin American reality. Throughout his career, Matta's artistic work underwent various mutations and he ventured into different techniques. At the end of the 1930s he made his first large-format oil paintings, a medium that would be the most characteristic of his production. To create his initial works, he used surreal psychic automatism as a creative process, seeking to bring to light the most hidden visions of the mind. In the 1950s, coinciding with his move away from surrealism, Matta developed a personal poetics. This coincides, on the one hand, with the appearance of figurative elements in his paintings and, on the other, with the intensification of his political consciousness. Since the 70s, the presence of anthropomorphic figures in his images has become more and more frequent.