Fernando Reyes American, b. 1954

Fernando Reyes’s extensive resume of national and regional exhibitions was built from his Jingletown studio in Oakland, California, where he has worked since 1999. Born and raised in Fresno, California, Reyes spent his childhood summers picking grapes with his family. The brown kraft paper used to dry the sun-drenched fruit became his first source of drawing paper. Like many artists, he was a creator from an early age. After almost two decades working in San Francisco as a professional, Reyes left the Golden State to study at the prestigious School of the Art Institute of Chicago, graduating with a BFA in painting. His early career was defined by an academic style of painting, heavily dedicated to figuration and landscapes. In 2014, Reyes’ work shifted profoundly after seeing a Matisse exhibition called “The Cut-Outs” at MoMA. Reconsidering the painted compositions he had spent his career refining, he began to explore new mediums. Just like Matisse, he found that composing with paper cut-outs was a completely different way of creating and one that opened new avenues for exploration. In the subsequent years, he has integrated paper cut-outs and printmaking into his artistic practice. He allows these new mediums to work separately and flow together, expanding his visual language from representations to complete abstraction.

Over the course of his career, Reyes has built a diverse portfolio and an extensive exhibition history. In 2018, he was honored with a retrospective at the Mexican Museum of Art in San Francisco. His work is part of the collections of Stanford University Medical Center, Alameda County Arts Collection and the Lesbian and Gay Museum of Arts in NY, as well as numerous private and corporate collections. Today, he splits time between his studios in Oakland and the Sierra foothills, finding inspiration in the diversity of his surroundings.