Belkis Ayón was a charismatic and vividly original Cuban artist who took her own life in 1999, at the age of 32. She left behind a body of work so distinctive – enormous prints, in black and white, using spartan cardboard – that it is hard to imagine what she would have made next. But at the end of this startling exhibition, which presents more than 40 works, there is a sense of something more personal stirring in her art’s singularly strange and intricate mythology.
Born and raised in Havana, the daughter of a former fighter in the Angolan civil war, Ayón came upon the secretive and insular brotherhood of Abakuá – a kind of Afro-Cuban freemasonry – through rumours and newspaper stories in childhood. It gave her the characters, myths and narratives that underpin her art. What you see are giant friezes – black on white, white on black, and many shimmering greys between – set in forest glades, nameless caves, even beneath the ocean, in which sinuous figures with watchful eyes appear in outlandish scenarios.
