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.”
The word Pillay repeatedly returns to in describing this body of work is “portmanteau” – a word formed through the blending of others, carrying multiple meanings simultaneously. In this sense, the paintings themselves become visual portmanteaus: conduits and bridges through which unstable histories, images and emotions are layered together. Blending and reworking each changeable moment, the works attempt to address the lingering feeling that accompanies haunting, the beginning of a thought that insists on being revisited. Despite their engagement with grief and loss, Pillay describes these paintings as fundamentally optimistic: less concerned with nostalgia than with the persistent spectral traces that continue to shape her contemporary identity and memory.
