Matilde Pérez Cerda is a painter, sculptor and visual artist. She was born in Santiago, Chile, on December 7, 1916 and died in the same city on October 02, 2014. Married to the artist and professor at the University of Chile Gustavo Carrasco.
She began her artistic training in 1938, when she took private painting classes with the master Pedro Reszka. In 1939 she entered the School of Fine Arts, where she was a student of Pablo Burchard and Jorge Caballero. In 1944 she studied mural painting with the artist Laureano Guevara and was his assistant in the making of murals in the Ciudad del Niño in the commune of La Cisterna in Santiago.
In 1948 she worked as a Drawing Teacher at Dunalastair College; in 1950 she organized and created, together with other professors, an Academy of Plastic Arts in Providencia.
In 1951 she was appointed assistant to the Chair of Drawing and Painting at the School of Fine Arts of the University of Chile; in 1955 she taught a watercolor course at the University’s Summer Schools, that same year she was appointed Assistant Professor of Drawing and Painting in the Fine Arts initiation courses, being in 1957 a full-time Interim Professor of the same chair.
In 1960, when she was already a nationally established artist, deserving of important awards and distinctions, and having a long career as a professor, she was awarded a scholarship by the French Government to study in Paris.
Between 1970 and 1972 she was commissioned by the University of Chile to continue her research and studies on kinetic art in Paris.
In 1972 she completed her transfer from Professor of Fine Arts to the School of Design, becoming dependent on the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Chile; in 1974 she was appointed full-time Research Professor at the School of Architecture.
In 1975, together with other professors, she formed the Center for Kinetic Research at the Design School of the University of Chile.
In 1984 she worked as a Professor of the Painting Course at the Providencia Cultural Institute of Santiago.
Her retrospective exhibition El Ojo Móvil, carried out in 1999 and her extensive work in artistic dissemination, earned her the Best of the Best award from the Circle of Art Critics.