"Emma Reyes begins her life in Bogotá and ends it in France. She was a woman who spent a large part of her existence in a convent, and what she knew of the world was what lay within those walls filled with God, until she decides to flee and discovers another world for herself, the world in which she becomes an artist and painter."
- Jerónimo García Riaño on Emma Reyes
Emma Reyes was a Colombian painter and intellectual. Born in Bogotá, she also lived in Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Jerusalem, Washington, and Rome before settling in Paris. She dedicated most of her life to painting and drawing, slowly breaking through as an artist and forging friendships with some of the most distinguished European and Latin American artists, writers, and intellectuals of the twentieth century, among them Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Pier Paolo Pasolini. The year she passed away, the French government named her a Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters.
Born in 1919 in Bogotá, the childhood of Emma Reyes was marked by abandonment and poverty, leading her to embark on a series of journeys that saw her life and work primarily between Latin America and Europe, particularly in France, where she consolidated her career and died in Bordeaux in 2003. After winning a scholarship in Argentina in 1947, she studied in Paris with André Lothe and began what would become a successful international artistic career, with solo exhibitions in France, Italy, Israel, Belgium, Germany, and the United States.
The evolution of her work was influenced by various movements such as post-Cubism, abstract expressionism, new realism, and kinetic art, as well as by a distinctly Latin American worldview that aligned with the thoughts of some of her colleagues and mentors like Diego Rivera. Her pictorial language went through various stages, oscillating between figuration and abstraction with a multicolor or monochrome palette. Reyes allowed herself the freedom to explore forms and materials, themes, and conditions of the human essence, over nearly six decades of work.
Her work is endowed with a profoundly experimental formal syncretism, where her visual lexicon was influenced by a constant dialogue with her experiences, her identity, and the places she visited throughout her life. However, a characteristic feature that runs through her entire pictorial oeuvre is the artist's technique, where from a line that appears to be continuous, she constructs the entire structure of the image or painting, creating forms that curl in on themselves resembling labyrinths, spider webs, and weavings. Her compositions suggest movement and are closely framed to represent life.
Her work exhibits an undeniable fidelity to herself, where a language rooted in her personal history is evident. Aspects such as the connection with the abundant Latin American nature emerge in different formal aspects throughout her pictorial practice, as is visible in her multicolor works imbued with magical realism and in her animist tendency, where frequently recurring patterns of threads and rings endow the image with a lively quality and an organic energy.