In the mid-1930s, while in Madrid, Spain, Roberto Matta met famed poet Federico García Lorca, who introduced him to the Surrealist Salvador Dalí. Invited by André Breton, the founder of the movement, to become an official member of the Surrealists, Matta adopted their technique of automatism—automatic drawing in which the hand moves not by conscious design but instead, as they believed, controlled by the unconscious mind. By 1938, he began his “inscapes” or “psychological morphologies,” as he called them. Alien and abstract but also hauntingly familiar, the compositions are characterized by vivid hues and the coalescing of architectural space with biomorphic forms. With the outbreak of World War II, Matta moved to New York. He translated Surrealist ideas into English, greatly impacting artists now associated with Abstract Expressionism. 

By the time he painted Gay Above All, Matta no longer associated himself with Surrealism, as he was instead interested in engaging with the social and political worlds around him. However, there are hints of his Surrealist past in this work. The different shapes and colors are evocative of an otherworldly landscape or of particles swirling in an imaginary, cacophonous universe. 

Roberto Matta (1911–2002), Gay Above All. Oil on canvas, 1959. 59 5/8 x 81 3/4 in. (151.45 x 207.65 cm). Gift of the Georgia Welles Apollo Society, 1999.5. On view in Gallery 5.