Biography, Selected Exhibitions, Artworks and Selected Press
Ravelle Pillay Dossier 2024
Ravelle Pillay
Head-Image
Biography
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.
Selected Solo Exhibitions
2024
The weight of a nail, Goodman Gallery, Cape Town
2023
Idyll, Chisenhale, London, UK
2022
Tide and Seed, Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg, South Africa
Selected Group Exhibitions
2023
(Un)Natural : Constructed Environments,Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University
2021
Silence calling from one continent to another, Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg
12 Hours of Breathing, 99 Loop Gallery, Cape Town
Divided Self, P72 Projects / Kalashnikov Gallery, Johannesburg
Untitled 8.99, 99 Loop Gallery, Cape Town
Selected Exhibitions
Ravelle Pillay: The weight of a nail
Goodman Gallery Cape Town
10 February - 23 March 2024
Creeping through and haunting these works are the lingering shadows of nationhood, heritage and the cycles of oppression experienced by generations of people across space and time, whose lives have been circumscribed by the dark, overt or barely noticeable incursions of colonialism.
For Pillay, painting has the potential to “peel back layers of history, shaped by the ‘civilising’, colonial gaze that defines photographic and material archives, and shapes collective memory.” The weight of a nail continues her interrogation of colonial legacies and migration and her exploration of what and how we remember. In this body of work, colonial notions of nation converge with stories of individual family members and the dispossession of a family home. Depictions of statues, the Durban botanical gardens, and architectural sites of imagined or reconstructed generational memory, are counterpointed with landscapes dense with vegetation, bodies of water and distinctively coloured compositions inspired by intimate family recollections as they collide with ‘official’ Historic narrative.
Ravelle Pillay: Idyll
24 February – 23 April 2023
Chisenhale London
Idyll –a peaceful or picturesque scene, typically idealised – is the title of Johannesburg-based artist Ravelle Pillay’s first UK solo exhibition. Eight new oil paintings on canvas, ranging from near life-size to smaller portals, are hung alongside a series of Indian ink drawings on translucent acetate. Connecting sites of enduring personal interest to the fallibility of memory, Idyll continues the artist’s reflections on how we remember – history, places and people.
Working primarily in painting, Pillay’s practice evolves from a personal process of archiving, drawing equally from family photographs and found imagery to map life-making in the wake of mass migration. As a descendent of Indian indentured workers – a system of contracted servitude, by which Indians were transported to European colonies for labour, following the abolition of slavery in the 19th century – Pillay’s paintings are haunted by a personal relationship to legacies of colonialism and migration.
Attuned to the ways nature can serve as both a witness to, and host of violence and trauma, Pillay’s landscapes are punctuated by plantlife that hold complex histories – banana and palm trees recur throughout. Thick with lush vegetation and flooded by swampy waters, each panorama threatens to engulf the ghostly figures that haunt it. Where viscous bodies of water pool deep and canopies cascade and conceal, figures fade away – spectral but ever-present.
Ravelle Pillay: Tide and Seed
Goodman Gallery Johannesburg
25 August - 30 September 2022
Goodman Gallery is pleased to present Tide and Seed, a solo exhibition by Ravelle Pillay and her first with the gallery. Featuring a selection of new paintings, this exhibition expresses Pillay’s core thematic considerations and unpacks the historical context that informs her practice.
As a descendant of labourers who were transported to the former British colony of Natal as part of a larger system of Indian indenture, Pillay’s work is closely informed by legacies of colonialism, and their reverberations in the present. Pillay uses painting and drawing as a material means through which to explore how colonial legacies have found form in personal and collective memory, the natural world, and in the idea of haunting.
Selected Artworks
Ravelle Pillay
The waterworks, 2023
Oil on canvas
Work: 120 x 120 cm (47.2 x 47.2 in.)
Unique
Ravelle Pillay
The firstborn (interloper), 2023
Oil on canvas
Work: 120 x 150 cm (47.2 x 59.1 in.)
Unique
Ravelle Pillay
Airs, 2023
Oil on canvas
Work: 150 x 120 cm (59.1 x 47.2 in.)
Unique
Ravelle Pillay
Night Garden (Winter), 2022
Oil on canvas
Work: 76 x 61 cm (29.9 x 24 in.)
Unique
Ravelle Pillay
The instruction (A gathering of friends), 2023
Oil on canvas
Work: 200 x 250 cm (78.7 x 98.4 in.)
Unique
Ravelle Pillay
Crossing, 2022
Oil on canvas
Work: 152.5 x 122 cm (60 x 48 in.)
Unique
