“An angel died who had the gift of making colour drip onto canvases, magically, in the right place”, Roberto Matta (1911-2002) said when he learnt Joan Miró’s (1893-1983) death; “now I am the last dinosaur”, he added. Gmurzynska Gallery is proud to announce the very first dialogue of the two dinosaurs of modern art in its new space located in the Fuller Building, at the same place of the legendary Pierre Matisse Gallery, exactly where Miro and Matta were both introduced first to the American audience, and so often exhibited. Highest promotor of the European avant-gardes in New York during some sixty years, Pierre Matisse (1900-1989), youngest son of Henri Matisse, has programmed in his gallery 35 solo shows of Miro since 1932, and displayed 7 Mattas’ solo shows between 1941 and 1948. The same year 1947, for instance, Miró is exhibited by Matisse’s Fuller building Gallery in May-June, and then is Matta in November.
Miró/Matta: a subject however never before addressed by art history. Two giants who nevertheless met, collaborated on magazines, books, and joint exhibitions. Two Hispanic immigrants exiled in pre-World war II Paris, then the world capital of the arts. Two modern artists who rode the surrealist wave while maintaining, voluntarily or involuntarily, their distance from the movement founded and led with an iron fist by André Breton. Two creators who found new impetus in New York after the war and were exhibited and promoted by the same gallery owner, Pierre Matisse. Two inventors of worlds, whose works intersect in several ways. Two painters who sought and drew the raw material for their art from dreams and reveries. Two major art legacies of the 20th-century avant-garde who profoundly influenced contemporary art.
Those two giants of the 20th Century painting indeed crossed each other many times. In 1937, Matta worked as an architect he was to the construction of the Spanish Republic Pavillion of the International Fair of Paris, where Miró was painting his large fresco Le Faucheur. Both artists were hispanic immigrants in the boiling arts scene of the Paris of the pre-war, and Miró and Matta became close to the Surrealism movement founded by André Breton, while maintenaing a certain distance with the Group (Miró because he never really liked the group spirit ; Matta as he left it after some years, excluded by Breton fo personal reasons). However André Breton always deeply admired Miró as well as Matta, considering them as two most important painters. In his Surealism and painting (1928) Breton wrote about Miró that his art attitude could let him seen as “ the most surrealist of all of us”. In 1939, in an issue of the arts magazine Minotaure, Breton marveled about Matta: “Each of the paintings Matta has produced over the past year is a ball of celebration where all possibilities come into play, a pearl that snowballs, incorporating all physical and mental light.” Miró and Matta both participated to the surrealistic arts magazine VVV in the 1940’s, and later Miro published works in the magazine Instead founded by Matta in 1948. Both were collected by Peggy Guggenheim, and other major avant-garde collectors. Miro and Matta both discovered in New York a new source of inspiration in the abstract expressionism raising movement, as well as they became very influential to the young American painters of the post war, such as Jackson Pollock or Robert Motherwell. The two painters loved poetry, working closely with Poets, and acting as poets into painting. The two invented each of them a singular and unique language of forms and signs, breaking all past principles of spatial constructions, and concepts of representation, creating biomorphic figures. Both multifaceted artists, they innovated in painting as well as sculpture, generating never seen art objects. Both permanently transgressed the border between abstraction and figuration, imposing another dimension in their art.
Miró and Matta reinvented painting. Miró, who claimed he wanted to “assassinate painting,” wrote to Pierre Matisse in 1936 that he was searching for a “profound poetic reality, extra-pictorial if you will, despite the pictorial and realistic appearances” in his work. Painting, Miro told Breton, must be “fertile”: “It must give birth to a world. Whether we see flowers, characters, or horses, it doesn't matter, as long as it reveals a world.” On his side, Matta liked to express : “I'm not an artist. I'm somebody who tries to construct images that will once help us realize the essence of the verb ‘to see’.” This exhibition presents two inventors of forms, pioneers of the freedom and innovation in art, that would come to characterize contemporary art. Although the two artists are present together in numerous museums and private collections, and although their works have been exhibited simultaneously in several group exhibitions in galleries and museums, Miro has never before been confronted with Matta in a dialogue exhibition so far. Dream, fantastic, and poetry, are three common pillars of the two artists, both obsessed by the creative richness of the sky and the cosmos, sharing a fascination for the figure of the woman, as well as a high sense of humour in their works. This exhibition, accompanied by a scientific catalogue, ambitions to highlight the convergences as well as the divergences in two of the most singulars and complex works of the history of modern art.