Few in Britain are likely to know the name Emma Reyes. In her native Colombia, however, she is celebrated as much for an extraordinary life — dramatised in a 15-part television series — as for her paintings and storytelling, which earned her the name “mama grande” among Latin American artists and writers living in France, where she settled during the early 1960s.
Her first solo UK exhibition, at White Cube Mason’s Yard, offers a belated introduction. Rather than attempting a full survey, it drops into the final years of Reyes’s career, when she was pursuing an increasingly radical approach to portraiture. In the resulting series, entitled “The Masks”, which she started in 1990 and continued almost until her death in 2003, faces are stripped down and reassembled into vivid, vibrating forms that hover somewhere between human, animal and plant — less representations of individuals than shifting states of being.
