Ravelle

Pillay

Revisitations

Preview: Thursday 4 June, 6-8 pm

In Conversation: Saturday 6 June, 3 pm, with the artist and Dr Zoé Whitley, a curator and writer based in London.

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 absence. The title operates simultaneously as “revisiting” and “visitation”, drawing on ideas of haunting and spectral presence associated with texts such as Avery F. Gordon’s Ghostly Matters. In this vein Pillay thinks of haunting as being troubled by something that needs to be reckoned with. It’s a lingering condition that demands a revisiting of reference material used in previous artworks; of photographs from both what Pillay calls “small” family archives, and from “big” archives, among them those of the National Archives in the United Kingdom, which have been an ongoing reference point in her practice, notably in her 2023 commission, Idyll, at the Chisenhale Gallery. She refers to these British archives as “the centre of knowledge for any place that has been colonised.” Adding: “if you want to learn more about your [identity], go to where it is kept.”

Learning more is heavily layered. For Pillay, discovering connections between her South African Indian lineage and British aristocratic ancestry, not as a claim to restitution, but as evidence of the complex, suppressed interconnections produced by colonial histories. In addition to colonial framing, she notes that apartheid-era racial categorisation obscured the deep entanglements between communities in South Africa, and suggests that her practice attempts to reveal these submerged continuities through archival excavation and, in her final output as an artist, painterly renewal.

The works in Revisitations expand Pillay’s interest in both the instability of the photographs she uses as her source material and the possibility of paint as a conduit of compassion: a way to make things more comfortable for the sitters, to revisit and reimagine each precarious imprint and the details they contain through thin layers of paint tirelessly worked over through solvents, washes and erasure. For Pillay, the associations attached to each image shift as variably as the original photographs themselves.