Although Matta was born in Chile, his career evolved in Paris, New York, and Mexico, among other places. From 1935 to 1937, he worked with the architect Le Corbusier in Paris. He also traveled to Spain, where he met the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca. Through Lorca, Matta met Salvador Dalí and André Breton and joined the surrealist movement in 1937. Fleeing World War II, Matta traveled to New York in 1939, where he met surrealists Luis Buñuel, Wolfgang Paalen, Kurt Seligmann, Yves Tanguy, and others. He served as a bridge between American and European avant-garde artists and has been credited with aiding the development of abstract expressionism. His work of the late 1930s and 1940s is characterized by webs of lines that give his compositions an atmospheric depth. Known as 'inscapes' or 'psychological morphologies', the seemingly ever-changing forms of these works serve as visual analogies for the artist's psyche.

Ilona Katzew, 2008