Word: wifredo
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...EXHIBIT: WIFREDO LAM AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES...
...intrigued by artists who, instead of ensconcing themselves securely in one frame of cultural reference, work at the interface of several, then you can't help feeling curious about Wifredo Lam. Lam died 11 years ago, after a lifetime spent moving between Paris, New York City and his native Cuba. But his work has rarely been shown in the past 20 years, and he is often treated as a peripheral figure on the margins of Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism...
...much more than that. Wifredo Lam and His Contemporaries, 1938-1952, at the Studio Museum in Harlem -- the 25th anniversary show of that battling, indispensable institution -- offers a rare chance to see his work in some depth. It isn't a full retrospective or anything like one: it leaves out Lam's youth and age and concentrates only on his middle years, especially those spent in Cuba. Its object is to sketch the kind of relations Lam set up between his Afro-Cuban heritage, the work of other Cuban artists, and the avant-gardes (the word still meant something...
...weird, edgy stuff, raucous and paranoid by turns. On one side it descends from the Cuban artist Wifredo Lam, whose images of cannibal nature-all claw, tooth and bone-were a significant, though now unfashionable, part of the impact surrealism made on New York in the 1940s. On the other it comes out of a native, down-home strand of buckeye humor, folk forms that verge unconsciously on surrealism: tall Texan stories and Bible Belt grotesqueries. A zoo of critters lurks in Alexander's paintings: snakes preying on rats, rats eyeing scrofulous cats, and so on up the food...
...Danes and Japanese below}. Any notion that the Latin Americans have failed to get the message is dispelled by this roundup of 17 accomplished painters from eight countries, among them Rufino Tamayo of Mexico, Alejandro Obregón of Colombia, Matta of Chile. Alejandro Otero of Venezuela and Wifredo Lam of Cuba. Through March...