The EY Exhibition: Wifredo Lam

Wifredo Lam’s work lies between East and West, Surrealism and tradition, Africa and the Caribbean, Europe and America. Lam’s career covers academic training in 1920’s Madrid, an encounter with Cubism and Surrealism in Paris, collaboration with Andre Breton and others in Marseille in 1940–1, and his engagement with Caribbean intellectuals in Martinique, Haiti and Cuba during and after the Second World War. His work which defined new ways of painting for the New World, was greeted with consternation and acclaim in New York. Later in his career he worked alongside Fontana and the Situationists in Europe during the 1960s.

Tracing a career of fifty years, this exhibition is made in collaboration with the Centre Pompidou, Paris and the Reina Sofia in Madrid. It is the first museum exhibition in London since 1952 of this artist’s work and confirms Wifredo Lam’s place at the centre of global modernism.