CubaPLUS Magazine

When artists and the public meet to celebrate art, as is the case of this 14th edition of the Havana Biennial, the imprint of great epoch-making figures emerges, such as Cuban Wifredo Lam, whose works can be appreciated in the most prestigious spaces in the world.

Precisely, Wifredo Lam is the name of the Contemporary Art Center that organizes every two years the now traditional appointment, which on this occasion is held virtually and in person in three stages, from November 12 to April 30, 2022, under the general motto of Future and Contemporaneity.

Considered among the most relevant creators of the 20th century fine arts, critics highlight in his work, among other values, introducing elements of the worldview of African origin in a renovating way.

In the opinion of chroniclers, his famous piece The Jungle, from 1943 and currently in the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA), is the &first painted manifesto of the Third World". That work and La Silla, (The Chair) from the same year, belonging to the National Museum of Fine Arts of Cuba, stand out as a synthesis of his work, in which quot;European surrealism and cubism are mixed with the power of the characteristic myth of the syncretic cults of the Caribbeanquot;.

Wifredo Oscar de la Concepción Lam Castilla was born on December 8, 1902 in Sagua la Grande, at the center of the island, the son of a Chinese father and a mulatto mother, and was himself an exponent of that fruitful mixture of African, Spanish and Chinese, three essential components of the Cuban identity.

He studied at the San Alejandro Professional School of Painting and Sculpture, in Havana, from 1920 to 1923; that last year he traveled to Spain, where he entered the Academia de San Fernando, in Madrid, and his language pointed to modern art. Paris received him in 1938 and there he became close friends with Pablo Picasso, who introduced him into the circles of the artistic avant-garde, in which he became intimate with André Breton, considered the ideologist of surrealism, Benjamin Péret, Pierre Loeb and other renowned European creators. In 1941 he returned to Cuba, where he lived through a fundamental creative period in his career, and in 1952 he returned to Europe.

Designated as the most universal of Cuban painters, Wifredo Lam also cultivated drawing, sculpture, engraving, ceramics ... He died in Paris on September 11, 1982 and his remains, by his own decision, rest on earth of his birthplace.