Isabel Reyes Santos

For drawing out the beauty in everyday cultural ephemera

- Isabel Martel Francisco

As an artist who loves to observe and comment on contemporary culture, Isabel Reyes Santos uses a style that makes use of modern-day fascinations, pop-culture, societal anecdotes like comics, and aspects of old Hollywood which she then reconfigures and repurposes with her perspective. In 2021, she bested more than 10,000 other entries to win the Uniqlo UT Grand Prix T-shirt design competition, launched in partnership with New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

Since there were so many delays in scheduling, lack of motivation really hit me during the pandemic. There was a time when my shows were being postponed every two weeks because alert levels or quarantine levels kept changing. It was also hard to create when every day you’re faced with bad news. You begin to think: