RAVELLE PILLAY
b. 1993Ravelle Pillay (b.1993) is a South African artist living and working in Johannesburg. Working primarily in painting, her work 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 as a way to consider agency, memory, and life-making. Her practice is concerned not only with the figurative and historical but with the material possibilities of painting, and of painting as a language for communion and mediation between past and present.
Pillay holds a degree in Fine Art from the University of the Witwatersrand. Her work has featured in exhibitions including Silence Calling from One Continent to Another (Goodman Gallery, 2021), the Investec Cape Town Art Fair (2022), 12 Hours of Breathing, (99 Loop Gallery, 2021) and Divided Self (P72 Projects/ Kalashnikovv Gallery, 2021) Pillay is the first prize recipient of the 2022 African Art Galleries Association’s Emerging Painting Invitational for painters from the African continent.
Pillay will have a solo exhibition of new works at Goodman Gallery Johannesburg in September 2022, and will be in residence at Gasworks, London from October to December 2022.
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