Roberto Matta (1911–2002) is one of the most prominent painters of the 20th century, and his work is included in the collections of museums worldwide. The artist, who was born in Chile, had a close dialogue with Surrealists such as Salvador Dalí, André Breton, and Marcel Duchamp, with whom he began exhibiting his work in 1938. Trained as an architect, Matta developed his idea of the relationship between space and human beings in the Paris studio of Le Corbusier. He created fictitious spaces in his paintings whose elements of scientific imagery invoke emotional experiences. In 1940, when Matta was living in exile in New York, he anticipated important developments of Abstract Expressionism.

After World War II, his mechanical humans reflected the political and social affairs of the time. The generous, extravagant, and often violent painting opposed the functional rationality of modernity, which Matta criticized as the source of human self-alienation. Matta confronted the right angle as the epitome of dimension and proportion, of module and production, with spaces whose organic curvatures and cavities correspond with the human body. These pictorial spaces allow the development of a new way of seeing in that they connect painting with the body.

The monumental paintings with their spherical colors and forms are accommodated by Richard Meier’s calm and clear architecture, which provides Matta’s pictures with the space they require.

It has been many years since the last large-scale retrospectives were mounted in Germany. At the Museum Frieder Burda in Baden-Baden, Matta: Fictions presents a painter who influenced an epoch. The exhibition, which was developed in collaboration with the Bucerius Kunst Forum, Hamburg, throws new light on Matta’s oeuvre and demonstrates its striking topicality for contemporary painting.