Few artists have so seamlessly woven together the currents of European modernism and Afro-Cuban spirituality as Wifredo Lam. A pivotal figure of the 20th century, Lam’s work defies simple categorization—at once surrealist, cubist, and deeply rooted in the visual and spiritual lexicons of the African diaspora.
Born in 1902 to a Chinese father and an Afro-Cuban mother, Lam embodied cultural hybridity long before it became a critical discourse. His artistic journey took him from Havana to Madrid, Paris, and Marseille, where encounters with Pablo Picasso, André Breton, and Henri Matisse shaped his early practice.
Yet, it was his return to Cuba in the 1940s that crystallized his singular vision: a language of fragmented forms, spectral figures, and pulsating energies drawn from Santería and Caribbean mythologies.
This vision reaches a striking chord in Ochosi, 1954, a significant new acquisition for the Watch Hill Collection. Named after the Yoruba orisha of hunting and justice, the work exemplifies Lam’s synthesis of Afro-Caribbean spirituality and modernist abstraction. His signature hybrid figures— part human, part lines and shapes, familiar, indecipherable —inhabit a liminal space where his ritual and resistance converge. We can see the specter of Ochosi’s bow or the outline of his shoulder, all against the myriad of shapes and symbols that overcome the figure. Through the reference of these shapes, perhaps Lam is deploying the Cubism ideas of time and process to a painting through creating an overlay of shapes and symbols that exist right on the edge of conscious understanding.
Ochosi, 1954, does not merely reference mythology; it enacts a reclamation, challenging Western narratives of primitivism and repositioning African diasporic identity within the avant-garde, marrying Afro-Cuban mythology against the theories of Modernist art.
Lam’s work has always been about more than form. It is a defiant act of cultural assertion, a visual language of survival and transformation. In Ochosi, we witness a master at his most effective.
