Nearly six decades into her career, Emma Reyes had her first solo presentation in Britain, previewed at White Cube’s Mason’s Yard on Thursday 3 September 2026.
The Bogotá-born painter Emma Reyes had her first solo presentation in Britain previewed at White Cube Mason’s Yard in St James’s on Thursday 3 September 2026.
Born in 1919, Reyes was abandoned by her mother at six or seven. She and her sister were sent to a convent that kept her from the outside world until she left at nineteen.
With no formal schooling, she reached Paris on a scholarship in 1943 and taught herself to paint. She rebuilt the pre-Columbian motifs, embroidery and basketry of her childhood into dense, continuous patterns.
Between 1969 and 1997 she wrote her sister a set of letters, published after her death in 2003 as The Book of Emma Reyes. For decades only a handful of institutions held her paintings, and the letters carried her name beyond a small circle of collectors.
The preview gathered paintings and works on paper across her career. It closed on The Masks, the series she began in Bordeaux in 1990, when she left likeness behind altogether.
The exhibition ran to 3 October, and the Thursday evening was the only session held before it opened to the public.