Roberto Sebastián Antonio Matta was born in Chile in 1911 to European parents. He graduated in Architecture from the Catholic University of Santiago and travelled to Europe in 1933, meeting the avant-garde architects, Le Corbusier and Alvar Aalto.

Roberto Matta´s first works were exhibited in the Spanish Pavilion at the International Exhibition of Paris. It was in Paris that he met Magritte, Picasso -who was exhibiting his "Guernica" at the time- and Miró, whose painting techniques he was greatly interested in. He later met André Breton through Dalí and Lorca in 1938, and came to form part of the Surrealist movement, in whose magazine, Minotaure, he published several articles. Ten years later, after a fruitful trip to New York and numerous exhibitions, he was expelled form the Surrealists. At the time of his expulsion he was involved in an important joint exhibition with Asger Jorn.

After living in Rome for four years, he returned to Paris in 1954. It was in Paris in 1956 that he produced his magnificent mural "The Doubts of Three Worlds" for UNESCO. In 1957 the New York Museum of Modern Art organised a retrospective exhibition of his work, which toured to Minneapolis and Boston.

Following several trips to Cuba, he was chairman of the 1968 Havana Cultural Conference, where he delivered his lecture, "Inner Guerrilla Warfare." In 1970 he visited several Arab nations to meet artists and intellectuals from these countries and produced paintings for the Angola liberation movement. In the same year, he also visited Peru and Chile, at the invitation of President Allende, and worked on collective murals with the "Ramona Parra" Brigade.

In 1970 the Berlin National Gallery, the New York Museum of Modern Art and various other cities organised several retrospective exhibitions of his works.

During the Seventies and Eighties, he showed widely in the most important European and American cities, including New York, Paris, Milan, Venice, Mexico City, Bogota and Caracas. Matta currently lives between Rome, Paris and London.