Artists

Ravelle Pillay

Press release

Goodman Gallery London presents Revisitations, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Ravelle Pillay, in which paint becomes a medium through which to bridge geographies, timelines and archives, alongside histories of indenture, colonialism, displacement and erasure within the artist's own family history. The exhibition marks Pillay's first gallery presentation in London since relocating to the United Kingdom, following a significant period of institutional and curatorial visibility in the city, including a residency at Gasworks in 2022, her first institutional solo exhibition at Chisenhale Gallery in 2023, and a major commission for the National Portrait Gallery in 2025. Emerging after her father's sudden death in late 2025, Revisitations returns to archival imagery as a way of navigating grief and honouring familial histories. Pillay's father was a first-generation immigrant, part of the Indian diaspora's migration to the United Kingdom. Working from photographs and documents recovered from his personal archive, the paintings restore presence to figures at risk of being forgotten — returning them to visibility through paint. Ravelle Pillay (b. Durban, South Africa) is a painter who considers the legacies of colonialism and migration, and how they haunt and reverberate in the present. She draws from found and family photographs, ephemera and oral history, as well as the material degradation of photographic images over time to consider the ways we construct our identities and the ways we remember. Solo shows include Idyll, Chisenhale Gallery, London (2023); Tide and Seed, Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg (2022); The Weight of a Nail, Goodman Gallery, Cape Town (2024); and Sanctum (the light and the shade), Goodman Gallery, New York (2025).