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Illustrated in IMPORTANT CUBAN ARTWORKS, Volume Twenty,
pages 34 to 37.

Illustrated in Wifredo Lam: Oeuvre Gravé et Lithographié,
Catalogue Raisonné, Musée de Gravelines, France, 1993,
pages 89 to 93.

Wifredo Lam's remarkable suite of prints, Apostroph'Apocalypse,
exemplifies his most audacious printmaking work. The series was
conceived as an art book, created in collaboration with the
avant-garde writer Gherasim Luca during the mid-1960s, amid
rising global nuclear tensions.

Lam’s draftsmanship reached new heights, reimagining his iconic
human-horse hybrids as weaponized phantoms soaring through
negative space – sensuous, vivid, and surreal. Beyond the mere
assuredness of the line, works from this series have an uncanny
texture and color. The distinctive shades are the product of a
technique created by Wifredo Lam in collaboration with renowned
printmaker Giorgio Upiglio in Milan, which allowed Lam to draw
directly on plates coated with powdered pigment. Only 25 copies
of Lam's hand-signed and numbered prints from this series,
produced on Japanese paper, exist. These individually signed
and numbered Japanese paper editions have become among
the artist’s most coveted prints.

Lam's 14 plates from Apostroph’Apocalypse, have graced esteemed
institutions like the Centre Pompidou Paris; National Library, Paris;
Nationalmuseum, Stockholm; Villa Medici, Rome; Palazzo della
Permanente, Milan; Yokohoma Museum of Art, Yokohama, Japan;
Fine Arts Central Academy, Beijing; Institute of Fine Arts, Hong Kong;
Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels; Fundació La Caixa, Barcelona;
Musée du dessin et de l’estampe Original, Gravelines,
France; and the Asian Art Archives, among many others.

NICO HOUGH

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