Adislen Reyes

Overview

Despite her youth, her work is eagerly sought and she exhibits in over a dozen solo and group exhibitions each year. Her work has generated considerable interest. Described as ‘a smart young feminist influenced by contemporary media culture, plying the waters of relationships, sexuality, and identity with wit, humor and more than a little kitsch’, this is an artist who is highly accomplished as a printmaker and who engages with tensions in young Cuban society today.

Each work created by Reyes has a story to tell and she challenges the viewer to look beyond the playful humor she employs to reflect on the deeper relationships expressed in each work. This socially conscious artist has treated a number of themes, including in a recent series of graphite drawings entitled Crisis, the conflictual relationships involving in creating art. In another series of textured printworks entitled Bluebloods she offers social and political reflections on Cuba’s youngest generation and its relationship with the past.

Works

Video

Biography

Popular imagery is employed in thought-provoking ways in several of her series. This body of work draws on images from the world of international advertising to question the social conditioning that shapes attitudes to women in society and to challenge the constructs of gender.

Adislen Reyes was born in 1984, in Havana. She is an artist and also a professor of printmaking at the San Alejandro Academy of Fine Arts, where she herself had studied. The next step in her artistic journey was at the Instituto Superior de Arte (ISA) where Reyes completed her degree in 2010. Since then, this artist has created several noteworthy bodies of work.

Reyes has exhibited extensively in Havana and further afield on the island. After appearing in the 11th edition of Havana’s renowned Biennial, her work was again selected to display in the official galleries of the 2015 Biennial held last May. She is also becoming known outside Cuba following group shows in numerous cities including in Washington DC, Boston, San Francisco, Miami, Berlin, Belize, Beijing, Taipei, and Madrid. Reyes was awarded the Havana-Cultura scholarship in 2012 and came second in an important exhibition of contemporary art in 2014 in Havana entitled Post-It.

Exhibitions