Artists

Emma Reyes

Press release

White Cube Mason’s Yard presents an exhibition of paintings and works on paper by Colombian painter Emma Reyes (1919–2003), the first solo presentation of her work in the UK. Across a career spanning nearly six decades, Reyes sought to reclaim and transform the visual vocabularies associated with South American cultures that had long been absorbed into Western painting, developing a distinctive pictorial language to foreground the interconnectedness of the living world. Self-taught, Reyes reworked the traditions of portraiture and still life, drawing on pre-Columbian artefacts, embroidery, basketry and the organic structures of nature to create densely patterned, animated surfaces. In her final series ‘Les Masques’ (‘The Masks’), initiated in Bordeaux in 1990, Reyes moved beyond portraiture as individual likeness towards a more expansive image of the human. Rendered in her typical striated style, these works harness the simplified forms found in ritual masks from American, Asian, Oceanian and African cultures.