Information
Biography
Rhea Dillon is an artist, writer and poet based in London. Dillon works across sculpture, painting, olfaction and wide-ranging materials to articulate an aesthetic of diasporic Blackness grounded in a postcolonial nonbeing. Her charged exhibitions and writing use poet(h)ics, abstraction, and everyday objects to produce distinctive arrangements of sense and affect. Dillon’s work is a long intergenerational study that connects to her ancestors through her eclectic armoury and experimentation with different forms.
Dillon is the author of Catgut – The Opera (Worms Publishing, 2023) and the poetry chapbook Donald Dahmer (2020). Their poems were anthologised and translated in [45-120] (JUF, 2025), and have most recently appeared in Topical Cream and Total Pet. She was the guest editor of the Interjection Calendar for Montez Press, 2024, which launched in May 2025 at Wendy’s Subway, NY. She has led poetry workshops at The Whitney Museum, NY, and presented at The London Library among other venues. She is the editor and comissioner of In The Margins.
Dillon has been invited to lecture at a number of institutions, symposiums, and universities, notedly Columbia University, Slade School of Art, Central Saint Martins, MO.CO. Montpellier, and the Victoria and Albert Museum. Most recently, she presented her research paper, Barbara Ferland and Caribbean Poethics, and served as a panellist at the 49th Society for Caribbean Studies Conference in Summer, 2026.
The artist’s first institutional solo exhibition, An Alterable Terrain, opened at Tate Britain, Art Now in 2023. Accompanying this major exhibition, a new book showcases her poetically insightful work. Edited by Dillon, An Alterable Terrain features her poethic writing, alongside newly commissioned texts, posthumously published poems from the poetry archives in Jamaica and installation views of the exhibition alongside individual works.
Select recent solo and group exhibitions include Traces at Cooper Cole, Toronto; Heads at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, NYC; Video Killed the Radio Star at Mudam, Luxembourg; Wo ich wohne at Haus am Waldsee, Berlin; Weather Stress Index at Hessel Museum of Art, CCS Bard Annandale-on-Hudson, NY; DFT 2025 at Wesleyan University, Connecticut; Gestural Poethics at Heidelberger Kunstverein, Germany; Accumulation – On Collecting, Growth and Excess at The Migros Museum of Contemporary Art, Zurich; Fractal Being at Cordova, Barcelona; Gestural Poetics at Soft Opening at Paul Soto, Los Angeles; Air de Repos (Breathwork) at Capc Bordeaux; Tituba, qui pour nous protéger? at Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Conversations at Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool; Burning Down the House: Rethinking Family at Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, Switzerland; Each now, is the time, the space at Lismore Castle Arts, Ireland; Janus at Berggruen Arts & Culture in partnership with The Kitchen, Palazzo Diedo, Venice; and The Black Fold at Kunstverein Kevin Space, Vienna.
She was an Elaine G. Weitzen Studio Program Fellow at the Whitney Museum's Independent Study Program 2024–2025 in New York, and the recipient of the 2025 Baloise Art Prize at Art Basel. She has been a Young Ambassador for The National Gallery, London, since 2025.
As an extension of her practice, she launched Studio Studio in Winter 2025.
Current
Upcoming
Artist Talk at the Art Institute of Chicago Wednesday, 11 November 2026 6pm – 7pm
The Society for Contemporary Art (SCA) and the Modern and Contemporary Department at the Art Institute of Chicago (AIC) invite’s Rhea Dillon to speak at the museum as part of their public programming season. Register for the event here
Material Shifts Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo 13 November 2026 – 28 February 2027
The works in this exhibition highlight sculpture’s transitional qualities. Spanning from conceptually driven works to material explorations, installations that activate the spaces they inhabit, and existing objects repurposed as art, together they map sculpture as a field made vital through translation. Ideas from outside the field are used to dynamic effects, as objects slip from one state into another.
The idea of ‘translation’ connects practices that are all distinct and often singular. The artists move between different media and formal qualities, creating a dynamic passage across shapes, materials, languages, and ideas. For some, translation becomes an act of transformation—a remaking of one thing into something materially or conceptually different. For others, it is a matter of transition, a more gradual shift from one form or thought into another—an alteration.
The exhibition includes works by Olga Balema, Katinka Bock, Ludovica Carbotta, Rhea Dillon, Miho Dohi, Vincent Fecteau, Ane Mette Hol, Brad Kronz, Jean-Luc Moulène, Germain Ngoma, Kaare Ruud, Stein Rønning, Diane Simpson, Dima Srouji, and Mungo Thomson.
Curated by Owen Martin and Steinar Sekkingstad
Contact
Representation Soft Opening, London
info@dillonrhea.com
Mailing List
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