Rafael Ferrer’s relationship to his native Puerto Rico and the improvisational nature of some kinds of Caribbean music are recurring themes in his art, which spans sculpture, painting, works on paper, and Afro-Cuban drumming. During a trip to Paris in the early 1950s, Ferrer struck up a friendship with the Cuban artist Wifredo Lam, whose unique fusion of surrealism and Caribbean forms left a deep impression.
LEAR, one of the sculptures Ferrer calls “constructions,” is made from calabash gourds arranged across steel supports. His assemblages reinterpret surrealist aims of representing the unconscious—in this case the psychic tension between Shakespeare’s King Lear and his three daughters—mixing it with materials and objectives of folk, African, and Indigenous art. This hybrid object underscores the primacy in Ferrer’s body of work of his continuous migrations and negotiations between the Americas.