EMMA REYES’ STILL LIFE RESURRECTS IN PARIS
Her work moves between uprootedness and invention, between the intimate and the universal, proposing a visual language that resists labels and reactivates cultural memory through a singular perspective.
Naturaleza muerta resucitando is the first comprehensive exhibition of Emma Reyes’ work in a gallery since her death in France in 2003. A self-taught artist, born in 1919 in Colombia, she was connected to various artistic scenes across the world and produced over two thousand works, leaving behind a considerable pictorial legacy that has eluded the institutional recognition that it deserves.
The illegitimate daughter of a prominent public figure and an indigenous woman from Boyaca, Reyes never forgot the importance of maintaining a pre-Colombian identity, inverting and re-appropriating the codes of colonization in her art. After a childhood spent in a catholic orphanage in Bogota, where every day she was forced to do embroidery work, she escaped at the age of eighteen, this period instilling in her the life-saving force of the imagination as a means of surviving violence. Her discovery of the world then lead her to painting. Without any formal training, she invents her own techniques, developing a very personal pictorial style characterized by continuous contours that delimit but also construct, filling space with dense parallel lines, volumes and textures.
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Emma Reyes, untitled, 1970, acrylic on canvas paper, 64 x 53 cm. Courtesy Crèvecœur
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Exhibition view, Naturaleza muerta resucitando, 2025, Crèvecœur, Paris. Courtesy of Crèvecœur
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Emma Reyes, untitled, 1984, acrylic on canvas paper, 88 x 72 cm. Courtesy of Crèvecœur
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Exhibition view, Naturaleza muerta resucitando, 2025, Crèvecœur, Paris. Courtesy of Crèvecœur
Across her various artistic encounters (from Diego Rivera to Marcel Janco, as well as Enrico Prampolini, Alberto Moravia, Gabriel García Marquez etc.) Reyes explores numerous stylistic approaches while fashioning her own very embodied, personal sensibility, never ceasing to emphasize the necessity of a new form of communication with the living world, beyond the hierarchical norms inherited from colonial civilization.
Reyes didn’t like the term “still life” (naturaleza muerta in Spanish, meaning “dead nature”) for her paintings always sought to represent an animate, and animating, life. This idea of “resuscitating the still life” is borrowed from Remedios Varo, who, in one of her last paintings Naturaleza muerta resucitando, depicts a moving round table in a gothic interior, above which eight plates and fruits spin, orbiting the flame of a candle like planets in a solar system. Juxtaposing sacred architecture with invisible cosmic force, this dynamic represents the kind of energy that we hope the new visibility of Emma Reyes’ work inspires.
Naturaleza muerta resucitando Will be on display until November 29, 2025, at Crèvecœur, 9 Rue des Cascades, 75020 Paris (France).
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