Renowned for her magnetic storytelling, Emma Reyes’s life is the stuff of legend. Across an oeuvre spanning nearly six decades, she continually returned to the human figure, and while experimenting with multiple styles, portraiture remained a constant concern. The painting on display was made when she lived in Rome from 1954 to 1960 – a time when she was close to prominent intellectuals, from authors Elsa Morante and Alberto Moravia to film director Pier Paolo Pasolini and her lover Enrico Prampolini, the Post-Cubist artist with whom she collaborated. Reyes’s canvases combine a visual lexicon rooted in her personal history, and a deeply experimental attitude to painting informed by Indigenism and Primitivism – tendencies she was encouraged to experiment with while training in Paris in the 1940s. The work presents the haunting image of a woman in a figurative style that plays with abstraction, layering, and pattern. The technique anticipates a distinctive feature of her later work: painted surfaces that reproduce the textures of thread, yarn, and textile.
This is the first time the work of Emma Reyes is presented at Biennale Arte.
—Sofia Gotti
