Martin Reyna



Biography

1964
Born in Buenos Aires.

1970
Had his first drawing experiences through his father, who taught him the only thing he knew how to draw: trees.

1982
He went to UBA, School of Sociology. He found there was a restrained atmosphere, and most students had ideas opposite to the military régime.
As Reyna was summoned for military service -draft was compulsory in those days-, the war for the recovery of Malvinas broke out -a subject he would deal with in a brief series of war paintings.

1984
Rafael Bueno presented "Los últimos pintores" (The Last Painters), a group made up by Sergio Avello, Alejandro De Ilzarbe, José Gaófalo, Gustavo Marrone, Miguel Harte, and Martín Reyna.

1985
Martín Reyna, José Garófalo and Duilio Pierri, Luis Pereyra and Armando Rearte presented the "D Line Project" to the Buenos Aires Subway Company; they volunteered to paint the advertising panels at Callao Station.

1986
Gallery M-13 in the East Village of New York City invited Rafael Bueno, Guillermo Kuitca, and Martín Reyna to take part in an exhibition titled "Latin Americans in New York".

1991
He arrived in Paris for an exhibition organized by Phillippe Cyroulnik, titled "El taller de Buenos Aires" (Buenos Aires Atelier), where he showed his work, together with Pablo Suárez, Roberto Elía, and Jorge Macchi.

1992
He traveled to London, where he had the chance to see William Turner's paintings and attended a retrospective exhibition of Gerhard Richter's work.

1994
The Michel Vidal Gallery offered him his first solo show in Paris.

1996
He worked both in Buenos Aires and Paris. There, he saw Bill Viola's work for the first time at the Chapelle de la Salpêtrière; he was mainly impressed by a video where the figure disappears under water: it begins with a drop and ends up with a mass of water that dissolves the figure.
This idea of dematerialization always interested Reyna, and water would be a constant element in his paintings.

1997
He was awarded the Jean-François Millet Second Prize by the International Visual Arts Society of Valognes, and began working in his present studio at the Rue Nationale, 13ème arrondissement, in Paris.

2000
He received financial backing from Fundación Antorchas, Buenos Aires, to develop a stage of his work based on a series of "Abstract Landscapes".

2001
His daughter Anna Reyna was born.