Naturaleza muerta resucitando

Crèvecoeur is pleased to present the first solo exhibition at the gallery dedicated to Emma Reyes (1919–2003), a singular Colombian artist whose work remained largely unknown for a long time. The exhibition brings together a group of emblematic works from her practice alongside archival documents, spanning nearly five decades of creation. It unfolds across the gallery’s three spaces, including 5 rue de Beaune — a site of historical resonance, where Reyes held a solo exhibition in 1967, when the space housed the Galerie Suzanne de Coninck. Born out of wedlock to a prominent father and an Indigenous mother from Boyacá, Emma Reyes was placed in a Catholic orphanage in Bogotá at the age of five, where she remained locked away until she escaped at eighteen. It was there that she learned embroidery, a practice in which she became the most gifted among the young girls forced to do it daily. As she became a painter — without academic training — she invented her own techniques. Though she never returned to embroidery, its logic persisted in the background of her work, as a symbolic thread running through all her series. Emma Reyes developed her artistic language over a life marked by constant migration — from Bogotá to Buenos Aires, Paris, Mexico City, Périgueux, and Rome. Active within various artistic communities she consistently surrounded herself with, she studied and worked with figures such as André Lhote, Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, Lola Álvarez Bravo, Enrico Prampolini, and Alberto Moravia. Her work draws from intimate memory, hybrid cultural imaginaries, and a deep connection to the living world. Her pictorial compositions give rise to lush vegetal surfaces, chimeric figures, and interlaced forms where the boundaries between body, nature, and myth become blurred. Reyes firmly stepped outside the frameworks of Western modernism. She proposed a vision informed by Indigenous references, rural iconographies, and anticolonial thought. Through series such as Imaginary Portraits and Flowers, Fruits, and Vegetables, she constructed a counter-image of the world — celebrating otherness, interdependence, and the intelligence of living beings. This rediscovery takes place in a context of growing institutional recognition: a monographic exhibition at MAMCO Geneva (2023), the publication of her monograph by JRP Editions, and presentations in 2025 at CAPC Bordeaux and the Musée d’Art et d’Archéologie du Périgord. The exhibition at Crèvecoeur marks an important step in reaffirming her place within art history.