Although he was a major modernist artist whose collaborators ranged from European greats like Pablo Picasso and André Breton to new world giants like Aimé Césaire, Cuban artist Wifredo Lam has not seen a major US retrospective worthy of his stature. That changes with the MoMA’s blockbuster show Wifredo Lam: When I Don’t Sleep, I Dream.
The product of years of work and dozens of collaborations with institutions and collectors around the world, When I Don’t Sleep, I Dream shows the entire sweep of a career that straddled eras. Lam is best-known for agglomerations of elongated and mysterious figures that borrow from cubism and surrealism, although the exhibition also shows different sides of this artist: lushly colored and textured pieces that verge on abstraction, sculptural heads that point toward the artist’s African roots, early figurative works, and the weird cacophonies of forms that the artist made through the 1960s and 70s.
