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Lot Essay
This work is sold with a certificate of authenticity signed by Germana Matta Ferrari and dated 6 October 2011.
"There is in man the need to re-act in the endless web on which we interplay with the world," Matta once reflected. "The artist is expected to see what is hidden, like the blind see with the mind." The realities of the Second World War and its psychological trauma weighed heavily on Matta by 1945, and his paintings from this time bear witness to the cataclysmic shock of the atomic age. "My vision of myself was becoming blind for not being made one with people about me," Matta wrote in the wake of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. "I thought to create a new morphology of others within my own field of consciousness."[1] Matta termed his paintings from the mid-1940s "social morphologies," and as his attention turned to the culture of modern civilization and the nature of humankind his paintings came likewise to reflect the anxiety and conscience of a new generation.
The anthropomorphic personages that began to appear in these works suggest a new preoccupation with ethnography and growing interest in primitive sculptures from Oceania and totems of Northwest Coast Indians, believed to signify communal thought and spiritual guardianship. "Whereas figural references had appeared often in his earlier drawings, Matta now felt compelled to incorporate them in a significant way in his paintings," curators Elizabeth A. T. Smith and Colette Dartnall have remarked. "Matta's approach to the figure drew very strongly on that of non-Western art and the totemic and incorporated a fascination with the primitive and the ritualistic that he had absorbed earlier in his career."[2]
The present Untitled bears a familial resemblance to Alberto Giacometti's Hands Holding the Void (Invisible Object), a cast of which Matta purchased in 1943 and in whose stylized body he identified a "synthesis of the Mediterranean, of Egypta synthesis of the image one has of Oceania, Africa, Greece, China."[3] Giacometti's last Surrealist work, Hands Holding the Void depicts a large-scale female figure trapped within a cage-like stall or throne, her hands clasping a cryptic and consummately unknowable "invisible object." Matta foregrounds a similarly enigmatic space in Untitled, describing a shapeless void between the deformed, crisscrossed arms of a disembodied female figure. Her shape delineated only by two breasts and long, tapering arms, the part-body appears to grasp at something just beyond the reach of her talon-like fingers. In the misshapen bareness and frustrated antagonism of its body, Untitled distills the sensation of loss and desire evoked by Giacometti's sculpture; stretching the length of the canvas, the form hangs in a state of pregnant perplexity and unease.
Untitled stands out among Matta's paintings from this time for its concise focus on a single form, cleanly outlined against a vaporous blue-green background. Its schematic breasts and arms reappear in contemporary works such as La femme affamée (1945) and Funferal (1946), characteristically attached to grotesque and monstrous humanoid beings meant to embody the inhumanity of the modern world. The present work steps away from the wider societal crisis, however, instead imaging in close up the dysmorphic body in space. Its pinkish flesh flawless and nearly human, the figure extends its limbs in and around the diffused deep space of the painting, proffering a glimpse of the world--or the void--just beyond its grasp.
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park
1) Roberto Matta Echaurren, quoted in Peter Selz, "Matta," Roberto Matta: Paintings & Drawings: 1971-1979 (La Jolla, CA: Tasende Gallery, 1980), 7-8.
2) Elizabeth A. T. Smith and Colette Dartnall, "Crushed Jewels, Air, Even Laughter: Matta in the 1940s," Matta in America: Paintings and Drawings of the 1940s (Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2001), 24.
3) Matta, quoted in Smith and Dartnall, "Crushed Jewels, Air, Even Laughter," 24.
"There is in man the need to re-act in the endless web on which we interplay with the world," Matta once reflected. "The artist is expected to see what is hidden, like the blind see with the mind." The realities of the Second World War and its psychological trauma weighed heavily on Matta by 1945, and his paintings from this time bear witness to the cataclysmic shock of the atomic age. "My vision of myself was becoming blind for not being made one with people about me," Matta wrote in the wake of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. "I thought to create a new morphology of others within my own field of consciousness."[1] Matta termed his paintings from the mid-1940s "social morphologies," and as his attention turned to the culture of modern civilization and the nature of humankind his paintings came likewise to reflect the anxiety and conscience of a new generation.
The anthropomorphic personages that began to appear in these works suggest a new preoccupation with ethnography and growing interest in primitive sculptures from Oceania and totems of Northwest Coast Indians, believed to signify communal thought and spiritual guardianship. "Whereas figural references had appeared often in his earlier drawings, Matta now felt compelled to incorporate them in a significant way in his paintings," curators Elizabeth A. T. Smith and Colette Dartnall have remarked. "Matta's approach to the figure drew very strongly on that of non-Western art and the totemic and incorporated a fascination with the primitive and the ritualistic that he had absorbed earlier in his career."[2]
The present Untitled bears a familial resemblance to Alberto Giacometti's Hands Holding the Void (Invisible Object), a cast of which Matta purchased in 1943 and in whose stylized body he identified a "synthesis of the Mediterranean, of Egypta synthesis of the image one has of Oceania, Africa, Greece, China."[3] Giacometti's last Surrealist work, Hands Holding the Void depicts a large-scale female figure trapped within a cage-like stall or throne, her hands clasping a cryptic and consummately unknowable "invisible object." Matta foregrounds a similarly enigmatic space in Untitled, describing a shapeless void between the deformed, crisscrossed arms of a disembodied female figure. Her shape delineated only by two breasts and long, tapering arms, the part-body appears to grasp at something just beyond the reach of her talon-like fingers. In the misshapen bareness and frustrated antagonism of its body, Untitled distills the sensation of loss and desire evoked by Giacometti's sculpture; stretching the length of the canvas, the form hangs in a state of pregnant perplexity and unease.
Untitled stands out among Matta's paintings from this time for its concise focus on a single form, cleanly outlined against a vaporous blue-green background. Its schematic breasts and arms reappear in contemporary works such as La femme affamée (1945) and Funferal (1946), characteristically attached to grotesque and monstrous humanoid beings meant to embody the inhumanity of the modern world. The present work steps away from the wider societal crisis, however, instead imaging in close up the dysmorphic body in space. Its pinkish flesh flawless and nearly human, the figure extends its limbs in and around the diffused deep space of the painting, proffering a glimpse of the world--or the void--just beyond its grasp.
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park
1) Roberto Matta Echaurren, quoted in Peter Selz, "Matta," Roberto Matta: Paintings & Drawings: 1971-1979 (La Jolla, CA: Tasende Gallery, 1980), 7-8.
2) Elizabeth A. T. Smith and Colette Dartnall, "Crushed Jewels, Air, Even Laughter: Matta in the 1940s," Matta in America: Paintings and Drawings of the 1940s (Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2001), 24.
3) Matta, quoted in Smith and Dartnall, "Crushed Jewels, Air, Even Laughter," 24.