Osvaldo Reyes

His work has been exhibited in Chile, Mexico, and Canada and in 2003, on the 30th anniversary of the military coup, Reyes presented a retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Santiago, Chile, sponsored by the Canadian Embassy in Santiago, the Chilean Consulate in Toronto and the Bureau for the Chilean Community Abroad.

The family's separation tormented him, so when some of their older offspring later moved to Canada, Reyes and his wife followed in 1988. With this move, Osvaldo Reyes had to adapt to a new culture, a new language, and, above all, a greater distance from his native land. He succeeded in making his way in Canada, which also became home to his family. In his Toronto workshop, he painted and drew with discipline every day.

The 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".

Shortly after the military coup, Reyes was dismissed from his position by the Pinochet dictatorship. He was lucky; more than a thousand people were detained and disappeared, another thousand murdered, more than thirty thousand tortured and hundreds of thousands forced into exile in the 17 years of the Pinochet regime. In 1978 Reyes left with his wife, Carmen, and the two youngest of their five children for Mexico and worked at the San Carlos Academy of Art for ten years.

He was a professor and director of the Escuela Experimental Artistica until September, 1973. This institution is known for producing hundreds of Chilean artists in a wide variety of artistic disciplines.

On returning from his scholarship, he became absorbed in academic work. He helped other painters to go to Mexico to study. He participated in the travelling mural exhibition “Las 40 Medidas” (“The 40 Measures”), inspired by Allende’s presidential program in 1970, which travelled around the country. The panels from this exhibition were destroyed by the dictatorship.

In the mid 1960s Osvaldo was involved, along with his students and other collaborators, in the painting of the pro Allende political murals.

In 1945, Osvaldo, along with Fernando Marcos, Carmen Cereceda and other mural painters from the School of Fine Arts, formed the "Group of Mural Painters of the Ministry of Education", their goal being to paint murals in the schools of Chile. One of the goals of this project was to involve children and give them the technical skills to go on to become artists.

Osvaldo Reyes Herrera (May 26, 1919 – December 23, 2007) was a Chilean artist who lived in Chile, Mexico, and Canada.

The eldest child of a railway baggage porter and a seamstress, he had to help support the family financially to ensure that his seven siblings were able to finish their education, while he studied to be a teacher. He was born in Santiago, Chile in 1919, when the world was reeling from the First World War. He experienced poverty and inequality firsthand, and had to strive hard to overcome them. He grew up in the Santiago barrio of Estación Central, which in those days was on the outskirts of the city. His teenage years coincided with the devastating effects of the Great Depression in the thirties in Chile, when the country suffered the bankruptcies and layoffs that provoked the worst social crisis in Latin America's history.