Born in Santiago, Chile, Roberto Matta studied architecture there before moving to Paris in 1933 to apprentice with the architect Le Corbusier. He joined the Surrealist movement in 1937, and began painting fantastic, imaginative landscapes. In 1938, Matta moved to New York, where he became a leading figure in the New York art world, socializing with other avantgarde émigré artists such as Marcel Duchamp.

Matta’s large canvases evoke the cosmos, totems, and the human psyche. His work was, in his words, an attempt to create a “psychological morphology,” or a visible map of human consciousness. In this composition, mechanical forms float in a surreal space. The diagrammatic nature of the elements suggests that the painting could function as a kind of blueprint for the subconscious. This work might also offer an example of what Matta called his “architecture of the imagination.”