EMMA REYES

Her extraordinary life—marked by poverty, abandonment, and resilience—is chronicled in her memoir Memoria por correspondencia.

Early Years

Born in Bogotá in 1919, Emma Reyes endured a childhood of extreme hardship, including abandonment by her mother and years spent in a convent, experiences that would profoundly shape her worldview and art. Illiterate until adulthood, Reyes escaped the convent at 19 and began a journey that took her across Latin America and Europe. She began her artistic career in Buenos Aires in 1945, studied in Paris under André Lhote, and collaborated with Diego Rivera in Mexico.

She lived in cities including Montevideo, Jerusalem, Washington, Rome, and ultimately settled in France, where she became part of the European intellectual and artistic circles, befriending figures such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Pier Paolo Pasolini.

Emma Reyes Artworks

Emma Reyes’s contemporary art practice moved between figuration and abstraction, drawing on a visual lexicon rooted in her personal history and Latin American heritage. Her works are known for their vibrant colours and rigorous tightly framed compositions, often depicting hybrid forms that unite human, plant, and animal worlds.

A hallmark of her style is the use of continuous, spidery lines that construct labyrinthine forms, evoking weavings, webs, and organic movement.

Influences

Reyes’s early paintings and drawings reflect the hardships of her youth, often depicting scenes of rural life, peasants, and indigenous people with a sense of both hardness and humanity. Her style was shaped by trends in naïve art, Mexican muralism, and indigenism, as well as by her encounters with post-Cubism, abstract expressionism, new realism, and kinetic art during her time in Europe.

Animism and Hybrid Beings

Curators have discussed her work in the context of the term ‘magic realism’, which describes a trend in late 20th-century Latin American fiction, could equally be applied to Reyes’ body of work. From the mid-1950s, Reyes developed a distinctive animistic approach, creating Monsters—part-human, part-animal hybrids—alongside close-up portraits of fruits, vegetables, and flowers. Her compositions brim with formal invention, where hair becomes petals, foliage turns into hats, and mouths transform into fruit, evoking pre-Columbian traditions and a deep connection to nature.

Major Series and Later Work

In the 1980s and 1990s, Reyes’s work became more flamboyant, drawing on memories of her travels and her South American identity. Her ‘Imaginary Portraits’ and ‘Flowers, Fruits, and Vegetables’ series are celebrated for their bold lines, vibrant colours, and tightly framed compositions that invite viewers to reconsider their relationship with the natural world. Reyes’s later paintings, often created in her adopted home of Périgueux, France, are marked by a sense of organic energy and a rejection of anthropocentrism.

Select Awards and Accolades

• Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters, France (2003)
• Scholarship to study in Paris (1947)

Exhibitions

Emma Reyes is increasing receiving attention in solo and group exhibitions. Below is a selection.

• Emma Reyes: A Revelatory Retrospective, MAMCO, Geneva (2023)
• Emma Reyes: The Many Faces of Emma Reyes, Galería La Cometa, Bogotá (2024)
• CAPC–Musée d’Art Contemporain, Bordeaux (2025, forthcoming)
• Biennale Arte 2024, Venice Biennale, Italy (2024)
• Latin American Art from the Essex Collection, various venues, UK
• Permanent Collection, Musée d’Art et d’Archéologie du Périgord, Périgueux

Emma Reyes FAQs

Ocula | 2025