Rare to auction, this extraordinary collection of Matta’s graphic work was made to accompany ‘Les Damnations’ with poetry by Joyce Mansour in a complete portfolio of 63 pages including 11 etchings and aquatints. Mansour was the best-known female Surrealist poet of the Paris avant-garde. She published 16 books of poetry illustrated by prominent Surrealist painters including Wifredo Lam, Max Walter Syanberg, and Roberto Matta.
These illustrations reveal Matta’s unique style, informed by the automatism of his Surrealist background and biomorphic figuration. In many of these works, Matta fuses organic and non-organic forms to show the creative-destructive cycle of the human-machine interface, specifically war. Matta wanted to “make the invisible visible” by suppressing the conscious mind and allowing a subconscious reality to surface – in many cases including eroticized scenes of abjection and horror. A Chilean-born painter and printmaker who worked with many European masters - Le Corbusier, Salvador Dali, Andre Breton, Walter Gropius and László Moholy-Nagy - Matta is widely considered to be one of the most important Latin American artists of the 20th century.
Encasement sleeve in good condition. Prints in excellent condition.