Malleable Dwellings

Chilean artist Roberto Matta and Austrian American architect and designer Frederick Kiesler shared a vision of architecture that drew on imaginative renderings of non-Euclidean geometry, notions of morphology, and explorations of biomorphic spaces that could modulate to the curves and movements of the body. Although the two did not meet until 1940, when they both resided in New York City, their ideas exhibit remarkable similarity. They both had the desire to picture the hypothetical possibilities of a curvilinear, antirationalist space inspired by new theories about the nature of the cosmos in the fields of physics and mathematics. Their work reimagined and attempted to render in two or three dimensions how objects and figures interacted with the visual, psychological, sensorial, and physical space around them, depicting these relationships as constantly evolving and changing, rather than static. Their joint participation in projects such as the Bloodflames exhibition in New York at the Hugo Gallery and the Exposition internationale du surréalisme in Paris at the Galerie Maeght in 1947 represent a unique moment in the history of surrealism when the boundaries between painting, architecture, and design ceased to exist. This new analysis of their writings and comparative approach to their work reveals how Kiesler and Matta’s association with the surrealists provided the catalyst for their exploration of the potentialities of architectural spaces, both real and imagined.