National Portrait Gallery
06.09 - 03.08.2026

South African artist Ravelle Pillay is one of nine artists with newly commissioned works by the National Portrait Gallery in London. Works by Pillay, Helen Cammock, Giana De Dier, Mary Evans, Małgorzata Mirga-Tas, Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley, Soheila Sokhanvari and Charmaine Watkiss are displayed throughout the building to reclaim untold narratives and connect past and present histories.

Presented in a range of media – installation, textile, painting, photomontage, drawing and film – their works place contemporary art at the heart of the Gallery to challenge the roots of portraiture and rethink its potential for today and for the future.

Shepstone (The bloom) by Ravelle Pillay, oil on canvas, 2025, NPG S36(2) © Ravelle Pillay. Courtesy of Jackson Pearce White and Goodman Gallery. Commissioned for Artists First with kind support from the CHANEL Culture Fund, 2025

Pillay’s paintings centre on her family’s history to explore the legacies of colonialism and migration, and the ways in which they haunt our present.

Entitled ‘Proof of Life’, her new body of work brings to the fore the story of Pillay’s great-great grandfather, John Edward Powys, who was of British descent and his wife Athilatchmy Velu Naicken, who went to South Africa as an indentured migrant worker from India. Although they were married and had nine children together, their union was not acknowledged in official records. Pillay considers the colonial structures that influence the historical narrative, addressing ‘the linked concepts of heritage and inheritance’ and asking ‘what entitles one to belong to a family, a lineage, a country?’

Trick of the light, cold fact by Ravelle Pillay, oil on canvas, 2025, NPG S36(1) © Ravelle Pillay. Courtesy of Jackson Pearce White and Goodman Gallery. Commissioned for Artists First with kind support from the CHANEL Culture Fund, 2025