Matta was born in Santiago de Chile on 11 November 1911 to a family of Spanish, Basque and French origins. After studying architecture, in 1934 he moved to Paris where he worked with Le Corbusier and came into contact with intellectuals such as Rafael Alberti and Federico García Lorca. He met André Breton and Salvador Dalí and joined Surrealism by developing a painting focused on psychological morphologies.
He is constantly on the move, from Scandinavia where he meets Alvar Aalto in London for Henry Moore, Roland Penrose and René Magritte. In Venice he knows De Chirico; always in the mood to joke, presented by a friend he went to meet him and asked "De Chirico? The real one or the fake one? "
At Salvador Dalí's request he goes to see André Breton who declares him surrealist. Of him, in 1944, Breton wrote: «Matta is the one who most trusts his own star, who is perhaps on the best way to reach the supreme secret: fire control».
At the beginning of World War II he fled to New York along with many other avant - garde artists. Here he exerts a decisive influence on some young artists such as Jackson Pollock and Arshile Gorky. He is dismissed from the surrealist group (in which he was later reinstated), accused of indirectly causing Gorky's suicide due to his relationship with the Armenian painter's wife.
Moved to Rome in 1949 it will become an important link between abstract expressionism and rising Italian abstractism.
Leaving Rome in 1954, she moved to Paris, maintaining a close bond with Italy. From the 1960s he elected Tarquinia as his parallel residence, settling in a former convent of the Passionist friars, where he is still buried.
Between 1973 and 1976 he designed and built, with the painter and sculptor Bruno Elisei, the Autoapocalipse, a house built by recycling old cars, as a provocation against consumerism. The first two modules are exhibited for the first time in Tarquinia (Church of S. Maria in Castello) and in Naples (Campi Flegrei), then completed (three modules) is exhibited in Bologna (Modern Art Gallery), Terni (Piazza del Comune), La Spezia (Central Allende), Florence (ramps of San Niccolò-Forte Belvedere).
In 1985 the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris dedicated a great retrospective to him. In the same year Chris Marker dedicated a documentary to him, Matta ’85.
In the early 1990s Matta designed a series of five obelisks-totem-antennas, 10 meters tall and made of metal, which he called Cosmo-Now, with the intention of being installed on each of the continents as a symbol of concord and planetary peace; The rental chosen for Europe was the Italian locality of Gubbio, linked to Francesco di Assisi.
His works are exhibited in the most important museums in the world (London, New York, Venice, Chicago, Rome, Washington, Paris, Tokyo).
He is the father of Gordon Matta-Clark, born 1943, of Pablo Echaurren, born 1951, of Federica Matta, born 1956 and Ramuntcho Matta, born 1960.
