FRIEZE MASTERS 2026

It was in Rome, between 1954 and 1960, that Emma Reyes developed her first fully realised attempt to reclaim forms drawn from the cultures of the Americas.Informed by her close study of pre-Columbian artefacts encountered in Mexico under the guidance of Diego Rivera—whom she assisted for more than a year—and by the ritual body paintings she observed among Indigenous communities, the Monsters series portrays those close to the artist—including the Futurist painter Enrico Prampolini, her partner and collaborator at the time, and the writer Alberto Moravia—as beings that are part human, part animal. While these paintings resonate with the post-Cubism then prevalent in Rome, they cannot be reduced to it: beyond establishing a continuum between human and animal, Reyes reasserts the animal dimension within each of us, far removed from any moral or religious notion of transgression. The painting presented here, one of the rare surviving works from this foundational body of work, has only one known counterpart, held in a Colombian public collection.

This hybridisation between species—which would find its fullest expression twenty years later in the late Masks series—continued in the early 1970s with the first series of Imaginary Portraits, unveiled here for the first time. Initially executed in black-and-white India ink on paper before shifting towards colour, the series reveals the hand of an artist trained in embroidery at the convent of the Sisters Auxiliatrices in Bogotá, where she was confined for more than ten years as a child. The works evoke a play of threads and taut lines set against one another, animating the surface and making it vibrate in a manner reminiscent of Op Art—a woven surface that constructs depth without recourse to Western perspective. Through the baroque, distorting line that would characterise her work for the next twenty years, Reyes evokes the immemorial coexistence of species: mouths morph into mushroom corollas, eyes recall rosebuds or nebulae—an ongoing oscillation between the infinitely small and the infinitely vast, between stardust and mitochondria.Preserved in the holdings of people close to the artist and absent from any exhibition to date, these works offer rare and direct access to the graphic laboratory of an artist whose work, long overlooked, has undergone a major rediscovery since 2023, beginning with her retrospective at MAMCO in Geneva and followed by the major exhibition dedicated to her by Crèvecœur in 2025. Her first solo exhibition in London is currently on view at White Cube