Wifredo Lam

Over a career spanning six decades, Wifredo Lam radically expanded the purview of modernism. Born in Cuba, Lam spent most of his life in Spain, France and Italy, and came to embody the figure of the transnational artist in the 20th century, forging a unique visual style at the confluence of European modernity and Caribbean and African diasporic cultures. The extent of his influence throughout the Black Atlantic is unrivaled as both a leading innovator and an anti-colonialist.
Published in conjunction with the most extensive retrospective devoted to the artist in the United States, Wifredo Lam: When I Don't Sleep, I Dream brings together more than 150 works from his prolific career—including paintings, large-scale works on paper, collaborative drawings, illustrated books, prints, ceramics and archival material. This landmark publication features extensive new photography; trenchant insights into Lam's relationship to Surrealism, Négritude and other literary, cultural and poetic movements; and the first in-depth conservation analysis of Lam's best-known painting, The Jungle (1942–43).
Wifredo Lam (1902–82) left his native Cuba at age 21 to pursue a career in painting. He studied first in Spain, where he fought in the Spanish Civil War, before moving to France in 1938. There he met artists and writers such as Pablo Picasso, André Breton and the Surrealists. Fleeing the Nazi occupation, Lam returned to Cuba in 1941, where his work became increasingly experimental, both technically and in the development of his unique visual language. Returning to Europe in 1952, where he spent the remainder of his life, Lam expanded his material production into printmaking and ceramics, while continuing his visionary approach to painting, which he called "an act of decolonization."

This chronological survey traces the Cuban painter and sculptor Wifredo Lam’s (1902–82) career from the late 1930s to the ’70s, spotlighting the radically syncretic visual language he developed in response to modernism’s Eurocentricity. Born to a Chinese father and Congolese Iberian mother, Lam placed heritage centrally in his work. Early in his career, he associated with major figures such as Picasso, Matisse and Braque, and he was struck by their integration of African iconography. Although he greatly respected these European artists, the dissonance between their aesthetic choices and cultural experience was not lost on him—especially given the racism and exploitation that characterized Cuban society under the US-backed dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. Lam spent the rest of his career endeavoring to decolonize modernist art. From his early Surrealist works to his later preference for geometric abstraction, African sculpture and the Afro-Caribbean diaspora consistently informed his practice.
Published for an exhibition at Pace, The Imagination at Work includes paintings, works on paper and rarely seen bronze sculptures, as well as a biography of Lam’s life and career by the Latin American art scholar and curator Michaëla de Lacaze Mohrmann, who made curatorial contributions to the gallery’s exhibition. Essays by scholars Alexander Alberro, Kaira Cabañas, Samantha A. Noël and Alexandra Chang also feature.