Reka Nyari "Artemis"

Reka Nyari "Artemis" 2026

Hand-punctured archival pigment print with pressed flowers. Black box frame with museum glass, Framed
Dimensions: 18 x 22 inches
Unique
Signed on Recto

Reka Nyari (b. 1979, Helsinki) is a fine art photographer and mixed-media artist based in New York City. Raised between Finland and Hungary, she studied at the School of Visual Arts in New York and developed a practice centered on intimate stories of tattooed women from around the world. Her predominantly black-and-white photography combines portraiture and mixed media to explore identity, empowerment, femininity, and personal expression.

Nyari’s collaborative approach centers each subject’s individual story, with tattoos and props serving as integral elements of the narrative. Her work has been exhibited internationally at galleries, museums, and art fairs, and she received first-place honors from the International Photography Awards in 2010 and 2022. Her 225-page monograph, Femme Fatale: Female Erotic Photography, has been published in six languages and sold out worldwide. In 2021, her video art piece raised $200,000 for charity during Art Basel and was featured in The New York Times.

Artist Statement:

“For years, Nyari has devoted her practice to telling women's stories through large-scale black-and-white photography. Her subjects are tattooed women, women who carry their histories on their skin, whose bodies are documents of strength, resilience, and survival. The resulting images are not passive portraits, but active declarations. Each image is an act of witness, a collaboration between artist and subject, honoring the courage it takes to transform pain into permanence, darkness into beauty.

Nyari is drawn to what lies beneath the surface: the cracks, the scars, the accumulated weight of a life fully lived. She finds humanity there and power. The women she photographs are not defined by what they have endured, but elevated by it. These are women on the rise.

Her work has long engaged with the tattoo needle as a tool of authorship, a means by which women inscribe their own narratives onto their bodies. In her photographic practice, Nyari extends this language to the printed page itself. Using a needle to puncture each print by hand, she scarifies the paper as one scarifies skin, deliberately, reverently, permanently. The raised, braille-like perforations that emerge are not merely decorative; they evoke a language for the blind, stories told through touch as much as sight. Stories on skin. Stories on paper. The surface becomes a body. The body becomes a text.

Her latest series, Immortal Ink, opens a new and extraordinary chapter. For the first time, Nyari brings collage into her practice, pressing real flowers, leaves, and butterflies gathered from upstate New York directly onto each photographic surface, merging the organic world with the human one. Nature, ink, and woman become inseparable. Women are positioned here as gods and creators, primal, sovereign, eternal. Every piece is unique, shaped by Nyari's hands and the particular life of each subject. She is, in the most literal and most poetic sense, painting with flowers.
Nature. Ink. Woman. All one." — Reka Nyari