Emma Reyes: Preview

Emma Reyes worked for nearly six decades and has never had a solo presentation in the UK until this one, which opens with a preview at White Cube Mason’s Yard on Thursday 3 September 2026, six until eight. Reyes was self-taught, and she reworked portraiture and still life out of pre-Columbian artefacts, embroidery, basketry and the structures of plants into densely patterned surfaces that read as one continuous living thing rather than a subject on a ground. The show gathers paintings and works on paper, and closes on ‘The Masks’, the series she began in Bordeaux in 1990 when she moved past likeness altogether. The exhibition runs from 4 September to 3 October, and the Thursday evening is the one session before it opens.