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Ravelle Pillay

Selected Artworks

Oil on canvas
Work: 200 x 250 cm
Unavailable
Oil on canvas
Work: 200 x 250 cm
Unavailable
Oil on canvas
Work: 200 x 250 cm
Unavailable
Oil on canvas
Work: 120 x 120 cm
Unavailable
Oil on canvas
Work: 130 x 180 cm
Unavailable
Oil on canvas
Work: 152.5 x 122 cm
Unavailable
Oil on canvas
Work: 122 x 152.2 cm
Unavailable
Oil on canvas
Work: 200 x 250 cm
Unavailable

About

Ravelle  Pillay image

Ravelle Pillay (b.1993, Durban, South Africa) is a painter who considers the legacies of colonialism and migration, and their subsequent hauntings and reverberations in the present. She draws from found and family photographs and the material degradation of images over time to consider agency, memory, and life-making.

Pillay’s first institutional show, Idyll, opened at Chisenhale Gallery, London in 2023. This followed a residency at Gasworks London at the end of 2022.

Group exhibitions include: Silence Calling from One Continent to Another, Goodman Gallery, (2021) and (Un)Natural : Constructed Environments at the Nasher Museum of Art (2023-2024). Pillay’s work will also be included in the exhibition Soulscapes, which opens at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, London in February 2024.

Pillay is the first prize recipient of the 2022 African Art Galleries Association’s Emerging Painting Invitational. Pillay received a degree in Fine Art from the University of the Witwatersrand in 2015.

She lives and works in Johannesburg.

Download full CV

Exhibitions

New York Gallery
29 April - 30 June 2025
Basel Artfair
13 June - 16 June 2024

Films

Press & News

press

“The heart of history is a critical discourse that is antithetical to spontaneous memory. History is perpetually suspicious of memory, and its true mission is to suppress and destroy it.” – Pierre ...

press

In her second solo exhibition with Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg-based artist Ravelle Pillay shows new paintings of a particular world wrought by colonialism. Pillay was born in the port city of Du...