Emma Reyes has become an iconic figure in Colombia since the publication of Memoria por Correspondencia just over a decade ago. This book compiles the letters she sent to Germán Arciniegas during the 1960s and 1970s, where she narrates her struggles and childhood memories. It documents her life and fills a gap in Colombian literature, revealing stories that deserve to be told. However, many are unaware that, beyond her literary side, Reyes dedicated much of her life to painting, with an artistic production intertwined with her life story, spanning from the 1940s until the late 20th century.

Emma Reyes' life is an odyssey where reality surpasses fantasy. Those who knew her claim that the adventures narrated in her letters pale in comparison to those she lived during her travels around the world. From her daring overland journey from Colombia to Argentina in the 1940s, evolving from a self-taught artist to receiving a scholarship in Paris to study at the prestigious André Lhote Academy, to her work as an assistant to Diego Rivera and Lola Álvarez Bravo in Mexico in the 1950s, every stage of her life is a testament to her indomitable spirit. She traveled through much of the 20th-century art scene and became a key hostess for Colombian diaspora artists in France, where she resided from the early 1960s until her death in 2003.

Reyes returned to Colombia occasionally, but her work was exhibited in national galleries and museums. It's likely that a combination of distance, gender, and the predominance in Colombia during the 1960s to 1990s of non-figurative abstract art—the artistic canon defended by one of the most influential critics of the time, Marta Traba—meant that, like many other artists of her era, her work only resonated within small artistic circles, struggling to transcend globally.

As the world today begins to discover other facets of Emma Reyes, we present in Colombia the exhibition The Many Faces of Emma Reyes, a selection of more than fifty works from the collection of the Fundación Arte Vivo Otero Herrera, mostly created during the 1980s and 1990s. Inspired by her early travels through Andean countries, her work is imbued with the processes of fabric making, lush vegetation, and the faces of Latin America's peasants and indigenous populations. Reyes' paintings stand out for their vibrant use of color and the sinuous, organic lines that shape her images. Her art seems to tell us that behind what we see, whether fruits, vegetables, flowers, faces, or labyrinths, the underlying substance is the same for all.