Roberto Matta was born in Santiago, Chile in 1911.
After studying architecture in Santiago, he left Chile and settled in France, where he worked for some time in Le Corbusier's workshop. Having always had a surrealist inclination, he joined Andre Breton’s artist group. He fled the war which broke out in Europe at the beginning of the 1940s, and joined Marcel Duchamp in New York. After the war he returned to Chile and then settled permanently in Italy.
Matta was a painter, engraver and sculptor. His work has been the subject of several retrospectives, including two during his lifetime; a first at the National Museum of Modern Art in Paris and a second at the Queen Sofia Museum in Madrid.
