Some time ago I went to see the exhibition of artworks by the Colombian artist Emma Reyes (1919–2003) at White Cube, and I loved it.
Emma Reyes was born in Colombia and lived and worked across Latin America, Europe and the Middle East before settling in France. Her work developed through encounters with Mexican muralism, Indigenous visual traditions, European modernism, Surrealism and Expressionism. She repeatedly crossed geographical, cultural and artistic boundaries without settling neatly into one national or stylistic identity.
Her paintings depict tender worlds where people, animals, plants and imaginary creatures seem to grow into one another. Her figures often feel almost like memories: familiar and mysterious at the same time. I loved the colours, the strange faces, the hybrid beings and the tangled lines. They feel like little worlds to disappear into.
I was especially drawn to the way her lines weave everything together, travelling through the paintings and joining one form to another, giving them an almost embroidered, textile-like quality.
There is a sense of creating a world of her own in Reyes’s paintings…. something otherworldly, shaped by memory, movement, exile and the many places she called home. At the same time, there is something wonderfully earthbound: soil, plants, bodies and animals…. all intertwined.
Emma Reyes is another artist I am very happy to have discovered.
