John Sebastian MATTA under the pseudonym BATAN (1943-1976) - Lot 9

John Sebastian MATTA under the pseudonym BATAN (1943-1976) Under the pseudonym BATAN (1943-1976) Untitled, 1960 Graphite drawing, signed Batan lower left. Small tears at edges. 56 x 76 cm John Sebastian Matta (1943-1976) was the son of the great Chilean Surrealist painter Roberto Matta (1911-2002) and the American designer Anne Clark (1914-1997). Born in New York on June 22, 1943, he is the twin brother of Gordon Matta-Clark (1943-1978). A dreamy, unsociable child, totally out of touch with reality, John Sebastian suffered from schizophrenia, an illness that was still poorly understood in the 1950s. Alternating stays in various psychiatric institutions, he took up drawing, a practice he began at an early age, in the isolation and silence of his bedroom. His brother Gordon, a figure on the New York art scene in the 1970s, found him dead on a sidewalk, defenestrated, one day in 1976. His drawings, sometimes signed with the strange pseudonym Batan, are of the utmost rarity, with their troubled and mysterious poetic wanderings.