The Art Collector's Quarterly is pleased to offer this previously uncirculated,
numbered Matta lithograph . The edition of 200 pencil-signed pieces on
Arches paper was published in 1980 . 
OCTRAVI is a colour lithograph, with an image size of 22 X 30 inches
(sheet size 24-1/2 X 32 -1/2 inches) An artist's proof (EA) was previously
exhibited and catalogued under the name of HOMO FLUX. Exhibited at the
Haggerty Museum of Art, Milwaukee, Wisconsin. MATTA: Surrealism and
Beyond, 1997 (#67)
Please see below for more Matta information, bibliography and links to other Matta sites on the web.
Roberto Matta was born in Santiago, Chile in 1911 and was educated there at the College of the Sacred Heart and at the Catholic University, graduating in 1931 with a degree in Architecture. In 1936 Matta went to Paris and found employment as a draftsman with Le Corbusier. During this period, he met Pablo Neruda and Federico Garcia Lorca. Through Lorca, he met Dali, and through Dali he met Andre Breton who was impressed enough to buy some of Matta's drawings. In 1938, Matta joined the Surrealist group and participated in the International Surrealist Exhibition in Paris. At the outbreak of war in Europe, Matta , along with the other painters most associated with the movement, came to New York. His first one-man show was given at the Julian Levy Gallery in 1940. Max Ernst, whose name is inseperable from Surrealism, and Roberto Matta began an association with Peggy Guggenheim's influential New York gallery, Art of the Century, in 1941. Matta was a friend of Jackson Pollock during this time and was a very strong influence on the art of his close friend Arshile Gorky, whose work is said to have been a bridge between European Surrealism and what a new generation of American Surrealists were to make of it. Andre Breton considered Gorky to be the most important of the American recruits to Surrealism. Much younger than most of his colleagues, Matta endeavored to make a place for himself by extending the scope of Surrealism. His works, in their structure, sometimes suggest his Architectural training, yet the landscapes of his mind often depict other, impossible worlds. As Nicholas Calas said: "Matta replaced the repressed Microcosm with the unobtainable macrocosm.*" Working from transparent washes of color applied to his canvases with a rag, he developed the random forms he saw emerging there into human and mechanistic forms, sometimes defined and contained within geometric architectures. "...to promote this 'new order' and to secure once and for all his empire, Matta is the first to have undertaken, in the sphere of imaginative art, to revolutionize the perspective.**" Matta parted from the Surrealist group and returned to Europe in 1948, (he was re-integrated in 1959) settling first in Rome and then in Paris, where today he is alive and well and making art. His works hang in many of the world's most important museums, and interest in his art continues to grow. Matta is also well known as a printmaker and has developed a unique style in his graphic works. His etchings with aquatint and his Carborundum prints retain the luminescence typical of his oil paintings. ________________________________________________________
Matta Bibliography and other Matta links
