Wilfredo Lam

WILFREDO LAM (Sagua La Grande, Cuba, 1902 - Paris, 1982).
Untitled, 1966.
Ink on paper.
Enclosed certificate issued by the Wilfredo Lam Foundation.
Informative label on the back.
Signed in the upper left corner. Dated, dedicated and located (Paris) in the lower area.
Measurements: 29.5 x 40 cm; 48 x 59 cm (frame).
This work is part of Wilfredo's mature stage, a period in which his plastic language, already solidly consolidated, reaches a remarkable degree of synthesis and expressive autonomy. Made in ink on paper and dated in Paris, the piece responds to a key moment in his career, when the artist, internationally recognized, deepens in a personal iconography built over more than two decades of aesthetic reflection and artistic commitment.
Since his return to Cuba in the early 1940s, after an intense European training in contact with the avant-garde, especially cubism and surrealism, Lam oriented his practice towards the symbolic recovery of Afro-Caribbean cultural roots. Convinced that art should contribute to restore the historical and spiritual dignity of his people, he developed an imaginary populated by hybrid figures, masks, fragmented bodies and totemic presences, inspired by cults and mythologies of Yoruba origin. These references do not appear as folkloric quotations, but integrated into a complex formal structure, heir to the lessons learned from figures such as Picasso, André Breton or Wifredo Lam's own circle within the surrealist milieu.
In the 1960s, and particularly in works on paper such as this one, Lam refines this visual vocabulary to the point of reducing it to essential strokes. The ink, used with economy of means and great graphic precision, allows him to articulate ambiguous figures that oscillate between the human, the animal and the vegetable, a distinctive feature of his style. The space is constructed from rhythmic lines and superimpositions that suggest movement and internal tension, reinforcing the ritual and visionary character of the scene.
This piece can thus be understood as a concentrated manifestation of Lam's plastic thought in his maturity: a work in which cultural memory, formal experimentation and a symbolic dimension that transcends the anecdotal converge.

Wifredo Lam was initially trained in Havana, where he studied at the School of Fine Arts and held his first exhibitions in the 1920s. In 1923 he moved to Madrid thanks to a scholarship from the City Council of Sagua La Grande, completing his training in direct contact with the Spanish pictorial tradition and developing a modern language in which geometrizing structures and an early surrealist sensibility converge.
In 1938 he traveled to Paris, where his meeting with Picasso and his integration into the avant-garde circle marked a turning point in his career. During the years of the Second World War he remained in the Caribbean, in close relationship with figures such as André Breton, and upon his return to Cuba, in the early forties, he began a decisive stage focused on the symbolic recovery of Afro-Caribbean cultural roots.
In 1961 he received the Guggenheim International Prize, and between 1966 and 1967 multiple retrospectives of his work were held at the Kunsthalle in Basel, the Kestner-Gessellschaft in Hannover, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Museum of Modern Art in Stockholm and the Palace of Fine Arts in Brussels. Wifredo Lam is represented at the Guggenheim and MoMA in New York, the Museo Patio Herreriano in Valladolid, the Tate Gallery in London and the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, among others.