WIFREDO LAM AT MoMA: BETWEEN DREAM AND DECOLONIZATION

Spanning the six decades of Lam’s prolific career, Wifredo Lam: When I Don’t Sleep, I Dream will present more than 150 rarely seen artworks from the 1920s to the 1970s—including paintings, large-scale works on paper, collaborative drawings, illustrated books, prints, ceramics, and archival material— with key loans from the Estate of Wifredo Lam, Paris.

The retrospective will reveal how Lam—an artist born in Cuba who spent most of his life in Spain, France, and Italy—came to embody the figure of the transnational artist in the 20th century and forged a unique visual style at the confluence of European modernity, African diasporic culture, and Caribbean traditions.

Wifredo Lam: When I Don’t Sleep, I Dream is organized by Christophe Cherix, The Robert Lehman Foundation Chief Curator of Drawings and Prints, and Beverly Adams, The Estrellita Brodsky Curator of Latin American Art, with Damasia Lacroze, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Painting and Sculpture, and Eva Caston, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Drawings and Prints.

“Lam’s visionary commitment to making his painting an ‘act of decolonization,’ as he put it, forever changed modern art," said Cherix.

Born in the small town of Sagua La Grande, Cuba, Wifredo Lam (1902–1982) emigrated at age 21 to pursue training as a painter in Madrid, where he would combine modern approaches with explorations of his identity and political beliefs. Organized loosely chronologically, the exhibition will begin with some of these early paintings made during his time in Spain, including Lam’s first monumental work on paper mounted on canvas, La Guerra civil (The Spanish Civil War) (1937), which will be on view in the United States for the first time in over 30 years.

In 1938, Lam moved to Paris, where he met artists and writers such as Pablo Picasso and André Breton. After escaping to Marseille during the Nazi occupation of Paris, Lam collaborated with Surrealists who were also awaiting safe passage out of Europe—among these collaborations is a collection of drawings for Breton’s poetry volume Fata Morgana (1941), which will be on view.

After fleeing France in 1941, Lam returned to Cuba after almost two decades abroad, and he began experimenting with a variety of techniques, including painting with extremely thinned-out oils to heavy impasto, leaving large swaths of canvas unpainted, and using a range of palettes, from vibrant colors to grisaille and warm hues of brown. The retrospective will focus on how Lam’s return to Cuba led to an absolute reinvention of his work and the creation, in rapid succession, of some of his most important works, including The Jungle (1942–43), which has been in MoMA’s collection since 1945.

Arguably his bestknown work, The Jungle references the tropical Caribbean landscape, with its brutal history of sugarcane plantations and slavery, along with references to Afro-Caribbean religious practices. During this time, the artist sought new ways to visualize the fluidity between physical and spiritual space, fusing animal, human, and plant forms with profound significance, which can also be seen in other works.

Lam returned to Europe in 1952 and produced numerous large-scale works that moved closer to abstraction, before returning to figuration in the early 1960s with tangled, attenuated figures, as in Les Invités (The Guests) (1966). The retrospective will conclude with a selection of print portfolios and ceramics, including Vase I (1975), from the last decade of Lam’s life, which he spent in Albissola Marina, Italy.

When I Don’t Sleep, I Dream will be on view from November 10, 2025, through March 28, 2026, at MoMA, 11 West 53 Street, Manhattan, New York (United States).

*Cover image: Wifredo Lam. Les Invités, 1966. Oil and charcoal on canvas, 82 ⅝ x 98 ½ “ (210 x 250.2 cm). Collection Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, New York. © Wifredo Lam Estate, Adagp, Paris / ARS, New York 2025.