Goodman Gallery is pleased to present Ravelle Pillay’s American debut with Sanctum (The Light and the Shade), the artist’s first solo exhibition at the gallery’s New York location.
The exhibition features a new series of paintings that respond to Pillay’s 2024 trip to Réunion Island, offering a layered exploration of the island’s complex colonial history and its enduring influence on the landscape and its people. Through her work, Pillay examines themes of cultural hybridity, resilience and the ways landscapes bear witness to history.
Located in the Indian Ocean between Mauritius and Madagascar, Réunion Island is presently an overseas department of France with a cultural heritage shaped by African, Indian, Chinese and French influences. Pillay’s paintings respond to the complexities of pre- and colonial history; its postcolonial present and creole culture. Her work confronts the lingering presence of plantation society—its brutality and its enduring impact on contemporary life, agriculture and the island’s historical and present-day economy and politics.
Artworks
About
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 show, Idyll, opened at Chisenhale Gallery, London in 2023. This followed a residency at Gasworks London at the end of 2022.
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).
Select group exhibitions include Silence Calling from One Continent to Another, Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg (2021), (Un)Natural : Constructed Environments at the Nasher Museum of Art (2023-2024), Soulscapes at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, London (2024) and Standing in the Gap, Goodman Gallery, London (2024).
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.
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