Untitled

In the summer of 1941 Matta traveled to Taxco, Mexico. Along with his wife Anne, fellow artist Robert Motherwell, and Barbara Reis, daughter of collectors Bernard and Rebecca Reis, Matta spent three crucial months in the country, paying visits to fellow exiled Surrealists Gordon Onslow Ford and Wolfgang Paalen. The resulting body of work from this period reflect the intensity of his experience of the Mexican landscape as well as an inner psychological terrain; the looming chance of an eruption of the Parícutin volcano provided a decisive stimulus to his studies of the "terrifying power of the earth," furthering new comparisons between his person and the incendiary forces of nature.

Executed during this revelatory time in Taxco, the present work is rife with suggestions of volcanic imagery and biomorphic forms that appear in flux—burning, changing, transforming: “the earth not just seen with the naked eye but with the morphological eye.”