PIASA organizes a Modern and Contemporary Art auction on Wednesday, June 1st, 2022.
Featuring 42 lots, this auction offers a remarkable panorama of 20th and 21st century art through a selection of pieces that are particularly rare on the market. The selection is very international and includes works by major artists.
Iconic artists such as Picasso, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Ai Weiwei, etc. are joined by some of the key figures that PIASA supports over the years: the Greek sculptor Takis, and artists from the South American scene such as Wifredo Lam.
Wifredo Lam
Desnudo en el Balcon, circa 1938
Estimate: 140 000 / 180 000 €
Wifredo Lam (1902-1982) spent his early years in Cuba, where he studied at the Havana School of Fine Arts. Son of a Chinese merchant who immigrated to the island in the 19th century and a Métis woman of Spanish and African ancestors, he embraced and explored these rich and complex origins. In 1923, Lam left for Spain, where he discovered Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne, Matisse and the German expressionists, an European heritage that helped him "find himself in everything that has lost its ancestors" (Alain Jouffroy) and led him to develop a language of highly stylised forms.
Extremely sensitive to the nature he lived with, surrounded, as he liked to call it, by his "little jungle", he began to draw and produced landscapes and portraits. In 1923, he participated at the Havana Fine Arts Exhibition. The exhibition was a success and allowed him to win a scholarship to study in Europe.
When he arrived in Madrid, he was disappointed by the formal teaching at the Academia de Bellas Artes San Fernando and turned to the Prado, where he found the great masters such as El Greco, Velázquez and Dürer...
In 1929, during an exhibition at the Jardin Botanico in Madrid, Lam was particularly struck by the work of Pablo Picasso. The two men met when Lam arrived in Paris, and this was the beginning of a friendship between them - and above all for Lam, an entry into the circle of the avant-garde: Georges Braque, Henri Matisse, Joan Miro. Pierre Loeb organises his first solo exhibition in France in 1939.
When war was declared, Lam became close to André Breton and the Surrealists, whom he joined in Marseille and with whom he embarked for the United States in 1941. He made a stop in Martinique where he met André Masson and Aimé Césaire who founded the political and cultural review Tropiques, then he settled in Cuba for ten years, along with Pierre Loeb, Pierre Mabille and Benjamin Perret. Lam travelled to New York regularly and was very successful there: he was regularly exhibited at the Pierre Matisse Gallery, which led to the acquisition by the Museum of Modern Art of one of his masterpieces, The Jungle (1942-1943).
His painting is nourished by the dreams and visions of his childhood, by his later personal experiences, by the Caribbean landscape; he is particularly interested in mythologies, iconography, beliefs, religious and cultural heritage of African origin. All these influences have guided his work, which is marked by both Cubism and Surrealism.
