Wifredo Lam: Imagining New Worlds, Atlanta High Museum, February 14-May 24, 2015
A la fin de la nuit, 1969.
About:
The High is pleased to present a retrospective of work by Wifredo Lam, a preeminent artist of Latin American origin and one of the Surrealist movement’s most influential figures. Wifredo Lam: Imagining New Worlds will feature more than 40 paintings and a selection of drawings, prints and ephemera by the internationally renowned, Cuban-born artist. Many of Lam’s masterworks – drawn from public and private collections across Europe, Latin America and the U.S. – will be presented together for the first time in the exhibition, which offers a rare overview and reexamination of the artist’s career.
The Third World, 1965.
The exhibition will shed light on Lam’s seminal periods of artistic development, tracing the global path of his career from its academic roots in Madrid to Lam’s pivotal stay in pre-war Paris and his return to Cuba in the early 1940s. The works reveal the many important influences on Lam’s career, from the European literary and artistic avant-garde to African art. Born in Cuba to a Chinese father and a mother of African and Spanish descent, Lam (1902-82) gave expression to his multiracial and cultural ancestry while engaging with the major political, literary and artistic circles whose work came to define modernism in the 20th century. Lam is celebrated for his signature hybrid style of painting: a blend of surrealism, magic realism, modernism and postmodernism characterized by a cross-cultural fusion of influences including Afro-Cuban symbolism and imagery related to the Santería religion practiced in the Caribbean. The impact of Lam’s interactions with artists, poets and philosophers on his work is a central theme of Imagining New Worlds, which examines the influence on Lam’s work of such pioneering figures as Pablo Picasso, Breton, Federico García Lorca, Alejo Carpentier, Gabriel García Márquez and Aimé Césaire.
Grande Composition, 1965.
Jungle, 1943.
