View work by Ravelle Pillay as part of the National Portrait Gallery's 'Artists First: Contemporary Perspectives on Portraiture', a new programme of contemporary commissioning made possible through a continued partnership with the CHANEL Culture Fund. The programme includes eight contemporary artists commissioned to create new works in a variety of media that reclaim untold narratives for display alongside works from the National Portrait Gallery’s historic collection.
In dialogue with the Gallery’s Collection, the new commissions will respond to past and present histories, displayed alongside six centuries of portraiture, from the Tudor period to the present day. The artists – Helen Cammock, Giana De Dier, Mary Evans, Mary Reid Kelley & Patrick Kelley, Małgorzata Mirga-Tas, Ravelle Pillay, Soheila Sokhanvari and Charmaine Watkiss – will all be exhibiting at the National Portrait Gallery for the first time.
In gallery 29, a series of paintings will be exhibited by the South African artist Ravelle Pillay, who uses archival and family research and imagery to inform her figurative works. Exploring her own family’s recorded and oral histories, the paintings will respond to the legacies of colonialism and migration, and the ways in which they haunt our present.
