Osvaldo Reyes
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Osvaldo Reyes Herrera, (May 26, 1919 – December 23, 2007) was born in Santiago, Chile, the oldest of eight children.
At the age of nine Osvaldo went to work as his family's sole provider and once grown, he married in secret so he could stay to care for his family, instead of starting his own household. The first of his family to get an education, he made sure his siblings got the same opportunity, and later taught art to underprivileged and special needs children.
In Mexico, he studied art with the great Mexican muralists David Alfaro Siqueiros, Diego Rivera, Federico Cantu, Francisco de la Maza, Jose Gutierrez and Raul Anguiano. He was also assistant to the Nobel Award winner Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral. In his return to Chile he painted the mural "La Ronda", which was inspired by the work of Gabriela Mistral of the same name.
He was a professor and director of the Escuela Experimental Artistica until September, 1973. This institution is renowned for producing hundreds of Chilean artists in a wide variety of artistic disciplines. In 1978 he moved to Mexico with his family, among the thousands with socialist leanings to flee Chile after the Salvador Allende reformist government was toppled by a military coup. Reyes left with his wife, Carmen, and the two youngest of their five children and worked at the San Carlos Academy of Art for ten years. The family's separation tormented him, so when some of their older offspring later moved to Canada, Reyes and his wife followed suit.
He exhibited his work in Chile, Mexico, and Canada and in 2003 presented a retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Santiago, Chile.
The renowed Mexican muralist Raul Anguiano commented in 1987 that Osvaldo Reyes' work can be placed "among the latin american masters such as Guayasamin, Amelia Perez o Portinari, with a modernist touch that resembles the work of Leger and other German expressionists".
He died in Toronto, Canada after suffering a stroke.
