Odilon Redon and Roberto Matta

Schedule: July. 24 [Wed.] - August. 3 [Sat.] 2024 11:00 - 19:00
※Gallery closed Sun., Mon., and national holidays.

*Click images to view in original size

We are pleased to be presenting a number of fantastic prints, and paintings guided by the subconscious of Odilon Redon, a leading French Symbolist painter, and Roberto Matta, who participated in the Surrealism movement.
Between 1888 and 1896, Redon created 42 lithographs (including the cover) based on Gustave Flaubert's novel "Temptation of Saint Anthony".

They are known as one of Redon's masterpieces, in which he expressed a mysterious world similar to what seeing a hallucination would feel like by only using black, which he described as “the most essential color of all colors”.

The first collection was produced in 1888 (a total of 11 prints, limited edition to 60 copies), followed by the second collection in 1889 (a total of 7 prints, limited edition to 60 copies), the third collection had two editions; the first one in 1896 (a total of 24 prints, limited edition to 50 copies) and then in 1933 (a total of 22 prints, limited edition to 220 copies, published in 1938).

This exhibition will feature all 22 prints from the second edition of the third collection of “Temptation of Saint Anthony” (exhibits changed during the exhibition), and from the colored lithograph “Beatrice”.

This year marks the centenary of the Surrealist Manifesto.Matta developed and expressed his own theory for over 50 years, resonating with Surrealism automatism, a method of expression in which the brush is moved like a medium by the action of the unconscious.
We are pleased to be presenting 10 pieces of his fantastic etchings depicting a world drawn from the depths of his own mind.

■Odilon Redon
French symbolist painter. Born in Bordeaux in 1840. At 15, while studying painting under Stanislas Gorin, he became inspired by the works of Eugene Delacroix. Through Arman Clavaud, who was still a botanist at the time, Redon was introduced to literature by Edgar Allen Poe and Charles Baudelaire. Studied painting under Jean Leon Gerome for a time, but had trouble adapting to neoclassicism and returned to Bordeaux. Afterwards, he learned from Rodolphe Bresdin, a traveling engraver who was staying in Bordeaux. Bresdin's romanticist works had an influence on Redon which would continue to appear throughout his life. After the Franco-Prussian War, moved to Paris with the intention of becoming a draughtsman. When deciding the best way to make his charcoal drawings known, he learned lithography at the salon he frequented, and used this method to create his first print series, "Dans le Rêve" (1879). Following that, he created "A Edgar Poe" (1882), based on Poe's short stories, and "Les Origines" (1883), his own interpretation of Darwin's Theory of Evolution. Throughout these works, he used the motif of an eyeball, a tool that looks over the world. From 1888 to 1896, he worked on "La Tentation de Saint-Antoine 1-3", the series based on works by Gustave Flaubert that would come to represent Redon. These fantastic, dreamlike works are done in a monochrome black, which he called "the most essential of all colors".The third set of this series was republished posthumously in 1933, leaving it with two editions. Passed away in 1916.

■Roberto Matta
Born in Santiago, Chile in 1911. After studying architecture at the University in Santiago, Roberto Matta moved to Paris in 1933. He worked in Le Corbusier's office from 1934 to 1936. Then he participated in a surrealism group from 1937 and exhibited to International Exhibition of Surrealism in Paris in the next year.
After he hold his first solo exhibition at Pierre Matisse gallery in New York in 1942, he presented a large- scaled works one after another and became a representative artist of the late Surrealism. Passed away in 2002.

Exhibition View

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