#Matta at the National Museum in Krakow

Good news for the lovers of Roberto Matta (or Sebastiàn Matta or Roberto Sebastiàn Matta as you may call him) the famous avant-garde painter (but also architect, sculptor, drawing artist, interior designer and poet) active throughout the 20th century.  The exhibition “Matta. Man and Universe” at the National Museum in Krakow has been been extended until 31st of October!

Born in Santiago del Chile in 1911 Matta studied architecture and travelled to Paris where in 1937 he worked in Le Corbusier’s atelier. He worked also on the design of a Spanish pavilion for the World Exhibition in 1937, where the famous Picasso painting Guernica was exhibited. At the same time Garcia Lorca introduced Matta to the Surrealist painters Miró, Magritte, Caldero, Dali and Breton. In 1938 he took part to the first exhibition of the Surrealists and Marcel Duchamp defined him “the most perceptive painter of his generation” (whatever that might mean). In 1938 he moved to New York, then back to Europe. He kept on travelling extensively for the rest of his life, remaining a key figure of the art landscape worldwide, but quite isolated from the mainstreams. He died in Tarquinia (I) in 2002.

Matta is famous also because of the two sons who became both successful artists. Since the two sons had a complicated relationship with him I guess the first was son of Roberto and the second of Sebastiàn. For sure both Gordon Matta-Clark and Pablo Echaurren, inherited the passion of confusing names. In June 2013 they were for the first time together in an exhibition at the Fondazione Querini Stampalia in Venice.

The paintings are truly surprising even if, as it happened to me, one may not like them. In terms of modernity and freshness they look like contemporary paintings, although they are 50 or more years old.  But in order to see the paintings, well exhibited and lighted in a blackbox style, you will have to travel to Krakow. I could not take any pictures of them.  I just took some pictures of the museum building, which was the reason of my short visit and I liked very much, as often happens with buildings of the first post WWII period.