Dan Nadel and Cornelius Tittel on Roberto Matta
On the occasion of All Things Are Changing in All Dimensions, an exhibition of rarely seen drawings, sculptures, and paintings spanning 1951 to 1999 by Roberto Matta, BLUM is pleased to present a conversation on Matta with exhibition curators Dan Nadel and Cornelius Tittel.
This event is free and open to all. RSVP is encouraged.
Please note this event will be filmed; by attending, participants and visitors consent to video and audio recording and its publication and reproduction.
Limited parking available. Rideshare highly encouraged.
Click here to RSVP.
Saturday, May 18
4pm
BLUM Los Angeles
About Dan Nadel
Dan Nadel is curator-at-large for the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art. He has curated exhibitions for galleries and museums internationally including the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, UC Davis, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. His biography of Robert Crumb will be published in Spring 2025.
About Cornelius Tittel
Cornelius Tittel is editor-in-chief of Blau International, an art magazine published in Berlin. With Albert Oehlen, he is co-curating the Hans Josephsohn retrospective at Musée d’Àrt Moderne in Paris, opening in October 2025, and publishing a monograph on the sculptor with Skira Editore alongside.
About Roberto Matta
Roberto Sebastián Antonio Matta Echaurren (b. 1911, Santiago, Chile; d. 2002, Civitavecchia, Italy) studied architecture at the Colegio del Sagrado Corazón and the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. As a student, he attended a seminar on the theory of relativity and noted, “To understand the fact that there is no immobile point in the universe which could serve to measure distance and the speed of light was fascinating.” Soon after, he discovered Marcel Duchamp, and, furthering his interest in destabilizing points of view, gleaned that art could depict changeability in time and space. In 1933, he moved to Paris, finding work in the office of Le Corbusier until 1937. In 1936, he met the British painter Gordon Onslow Ford who introduced Matta to the Russian theoretician Pyotr Demianovich Ouspensky. Ouspensky espoused ideas about the fourth dimension. With this, and a heady dose of psychoanalytic reading, Matta began developing ideas about how to visualize consciousness. Having become enamored of surrealism, through his friend Federico García Lorca, Matta arranged a meeting with Salvador Dalí, who in turn introduced him to Breton. The elder surrealist was impressed by Matta’s near-psychedelic architectural drawings, and encouraged him to abandon architecture in favor of art. In 1938, Matta began making the paintings that imagined “inscapes” or three-dimensional visions of the modern psyche with skeins of flesh, allusive forms, and deep spaces.
Later in life, Matta lived between Paris, London, and Tarquinia, Italy. In these years, he introduced humanoid figures into his visual landscapes, enacting dramas of sex, politics, and struggle in an increasingly screen-centric and mechanized world. These images and Matta’s leftist beliefs made him a beacon for younger artists and groups for social change in the 1960s and 1970s. Matta’s first one-artist exhibition was held at the Julian Levy Gallery, New York, NY in 1940. His first major retrospective was held at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY (1957), which traveled to the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN (1957), and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA (1958). Retrospectives have recently been held at Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA (2001); Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain (1999); Centre Pompidou, Paris, France (1985); and, with his son Gordon Matta-Clark, at the San Diego Museum of Art, CA (2006). His work is represented in collections worldwide including at Art Institute of Chicago, IL; Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands; and Tate Britain, London, UK.