Ravelle

Pillay

Ravelle Pillay (b.1993, 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.

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

Other solo shows include 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) and Revisitations, Goodman Gallery, London (2026)

Select group exhibitions include Translations: Afro-Asian Poetics, Singapore (2024), (Un)Natural: Constructed Environments at the Nasher Museum of Art, Durham NC (2023–2024), Soulscapes at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, London (2024), Dis/orient: Contemporary Art of the Asian Diaspora, Nasher Museum of Art, Durham NC (2025–2026), Fields of Vision, Green Family Art Foundation, Dallas TX (2026), and A World Far Away, Nearby and Invisible: Territory Narratives in the Jorge M. Pérez Collection, Miami (2026)

Pillay was commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery in London, to create a body of work as part of the programme for Artists First: Contemporary Perspectives on Portraiture which opened in September 2025.

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

She lives and works in London.