Bio

His family left Haiti for New York after his father took part in a failed coup against the Duvalier dictatorship. Lamothe grew up in Brooklyn. By sixteen he was living on the street, and the trains became the only surface large enough for what he wanted to say.

He painted under the name Freddy. The work was loud on purpose: flat blocks of colour, figures drawn in one continuous line, no interest in blending or polish. It was built to be read at speed, from a platform, by someone who had eight seconds to look.

The downtown galleries came for that generation in the early eighties, and Lamothe was taken up along with Jean-Michel Basquiat and the other writers who had come off the trains. Fun Gallery, P.S.1, Fashion Moda in the Bronx and later the Sidney Janis Gallery put the work in front of people who had only ever seen it moving past them.

After Basquiat died in 1988, Lamothe left the scene and went back to Haiti. He was in Port-au-Prince for the 1991 coup against Jean-Bertrand Aristide, and the work changed there. Caribbean colour came into it, along with the sacred vèvè diagrams of Vodou, drawn with the same restless line he had used on steel.

Since then the paintings have been shown across Europe, Japan and the United States, and in 2021 one of them became the official poster of the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in London. He lives and works in Paris.