Available Works

James Reyes (b. 1991, Bronx, New York) is an American painter whose work explores the tension between figuration and abstraction through gesture-driven mark-making, incorporating moments of realism. Shaped by his cultural and social environment, Reyes develops compositions that balance immediacy and control, allowing figures and creatures to emerge, dissolve, and reassert themselves within dense, layered surfaces.

Reyes received his BFA from the School of Visual Arts in 2014. Early in his career, he was involved in artist-led, experimental exhibition models that emphasized accessibility and public engagement, including unsanctioned installations at the Whitney Museum of American Art, MoMA PS1, and New York City subway stations. These formative experiences continue to inform his approach to painting, which embraces risk, physicality, and improvisation.

Working across a range of scales and mediums, Reyes’s figures often appear simultaneously complete and fragmented, occupying a space between the recognizable and the surreal. This push and pull—between structure and collapse, image and gesture—serves as a throughline across his bodies of work.

Reyes’s work has been shown nationally and internationally and is held in private and institutional collections, including Mana Contemporary. His paintings will also enter the permanent collection of a museum scheduled to open in Baltimore in 2026.

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