The first solo exhibition in the UK by Johannesburg-based artist Ravelle Pillay will open at Chisenhale Gallery this month.

Chisenhale Gallery present Idyll, the first UK solo exhibition by Johannesburg-based artist Ravelle Pillay. Idyll includes eight never-before-seen oil paintings on canvas, ranging from near life-size to smaller portraits. The works are hung alongside a series of Indian ink drawings on 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. Capturing faded faces to smaller windows looking onto lush vistas, the paintings commissioned by Chisenhale Gallery recontextualise people and nature as vivid actors in the long arc of indentured labour.

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 descendant of Indian indentured labourers, Pillay’s paintings are haunted by a personal relationship to legacies of colonialism and migration. Merging the archival and imaginary, this new body of work considers the material possibilities of the medium, offering painting as a mediation between past and present, memory and experience.

Throughout the exhibition motifs repeat creating an uncanny familiarity; bodies of water are doubled and forms are tirelessly reworked. Pillay describes painting as thinking, with each composition resting on a decision: what to dissolve and conceal from view? What to render apparent? By concentrating and layering paint, whilst simultaneously diluting and rubbing out, Pillay exercises her own agency in reshaping familial and national narratives.

Location: 64 Chisenhale Road, London, E3 5QZ Date: 24 February-23 April 2023. Price: Free