On 20 April 2019, the Lecture Hall of the State Hermitage was the setting for a large public programme entitled “A Conversation about Roberto Matta and the Fourth Dimension”.
The format of the event, a continuation of the artist’s exhibition in the Hermitage, was unusual: the large audience that had gathered in the General Staff building that Saturday evening first listened to a lecture-study given by Professor Linda Henderson of the University of Texas at Austin, a prominent specialist on Matta’s oeuvre and the question of the fourth dimension in the art and philosophy of the 20th century. She constructed her talk on an analysis of ideas of the fourth dimension in science, citing Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, Peter D. Ouspensky’s writings and other early 20th-century scholars correlating them with the experiments in artistic practice made by Marcel Duchamp, Kazimir Malevich, Pablo Picasso and Roberto Matta.
The programme continued with a video conference featuring the prominent European art critic and curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, who is artistic director at London’s Serpentine Galleries, and Fariba Bogzaran of the USA, a specialist in the psychology of creativity. The constellation of leading contemporary artists that Obrist interviewed for many hours at a time in the 1990s included Roberto Matta. When asked what he thinks of Matta’s work twenty years on, Obrist said that the artist is entirely contemporary today “his spirit has always gone ahead of knowledge; he has always constructed bridges between different disciplines.” The contribution of Fariba Bogzaran, a specialist in vivid dreams, was devoted to the fourth dimension in Matta’s works. As Ouspensky wrote, “Beyond the bounds of visible reality, there exists an immense invisible world with its own connections and laws.” That is why, in Bogzaran’s opinion, artists should be clairvoyant: they can see what others are not capable of seeing. It was to that search for the invisible that Roberto Matta’s art was subordinated. His works are illustrations of the life of the inner world.
The lectures were followed by a brief discussion in which Gleb Yershov, a senior lecturer at St Petersburg State University and curator of contemporary art exhibitions, the artist and critic Dmitry Pilikin, and the artist Ivan Govorkov, a professor of the Repin Academic Institute of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, participated.
The programme was hosted by Sophia Kudriavtseva, head of the Hermitage’s Youth Centre, and the curator of the Roberto Matta exhibition, Oksana Salamatina (USA), who was the one who invited the foreign participants to speak before an audience in St Petersburg.
This public programme is one of the key events of the Hermitage Youth Centre’s extensive educational programme that will include cycles of lectures and meetings with the public throughout the exhibition’s run.
