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.
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.
Solo and group exhibitions from 2024 include 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, Lismore; and Janus at Berggruen Arts & Culture in partnership with The Kitchen, Palazzo Diedo, Venice.
She was the Guest Editor of the Interjection Calendar for Montez Press, 2024, which was launched in May 2025 in New York at Wendy’s Subway.
The artist presented Catgut – The Opera as part of Park Nights 2021 at the Serpentine Pavilion, a publication of the same title was released in 2023 by Worms Publishing and launched at the ICA London.
She was an Elaine G. Weitzen Studio Program Fellow at the Whitney Museum's Independent Study Program 2024–2025 in New York.
Current Exhibitions
Heads American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York 27 September 2025 – 8 January 2026
For this exhibition, the artist’s first institutional show in the United States, Dillon chose objects from Arts and Letters’s archive to accompany her work. Her selection features books from our collection by current or former members, including Malcolm Cowley, Toni Morrison, and Claudia Rankine. To supplement racial and geographic absences in the institution’s membership, Dillon also presents books by nonmember writers from the Caribbean or of Caribbean descent.
Throughout the show, Dillon will send small works and ephemera through the postal service, extending her exhibition beyond the walls of the Arts and Letters Library. To participate in this mailing project, please sign up here.
Curated by Noa Wesley
+ Group Exhibitions:
DFT 2025 Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery, Wesleyan University 24 September – 7 December 2025
The group exhibition DFT 2025 incorporates artworks by artists in a variety of media including sculpture, painting, video, installation, performance, and sound. The artworks on view and the exhibition’s curatorial strategies toy with core themes of DFT: concealment, elusiveness, and both accessibility and its opposite. The exhibition includes an expansive list of artists and artworks that map a web of relations that extend offsite. Thus the exhibition itself functions as the temporary nucleus of a network, the nodes of which emit multi-frequency transmissions on a spectrum between legibility, hiding in plain sight, and complete concealment.
Co-curated by Benjamin Chaffee and Salim Green
Contact
info@dillonrhea.com
Soft Opening, London
Mailing List
Email info@dillonrhea.com to be added with the subject title “Mailing List Request”