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
Group Exhibitions:
Video Killed the Radio Star: The 1980s and their Cultural Echoes Mudam Museum of Modern Art, Luxembourg 12 June – 11 October 2026
The 1980s were a decade defined by paradoxes: the gleaming surface of pop culture and the deep fractures of global politics; the rise of new technologies and the slow unravelling of old ideologies; the birth of MTV and the shadow of Chernobyl. The exhibition Video Killed the Radio Star will explore how the cultural and political transformations of the 1980s still inform the world we live in today. Drawing from the Mudam Collection and contextual documentation materials, the exhibition will revisit a pivotal moment in global culture: a time when image overtook voice, access replaced ownership and aesthetics began to mirror power in new ways. It will also examine the evolving perceptiveness and sensibilities of a world moving into a hyper-mediated era. From the Cold War’s final acts to the rise of neoliberalism, the 1980s marked a profound reorientation in the Western world – one that was soon reshaped by the emergence of other cultural forces, shifting the narrative and changing the game entirely.
Curated by Bettina Steinbrügge, assisted by Caroline Honorien and Alexine Taddeï
Wo ich wohne Haus am Waldsee, Berlin 14 June – 27 September 2026
Wo ich wohne reflects on the history of the Haus am Waldsee through its setting, the Villa Knobloch, built in 1922 for the Jewish textile manufacturer Herrmann Knobloch, where mere weeks after the end of the Second World War, the institution found its beginnings. The language of the building, in which both victims and perpetrators of National Socialism lived, is understood not only as a framework, but as a material in its own right – against, with, and through the works in the exhibition disclose ties between the private and the political. The violent events and social struggles of the past century echo in its architecture, its grounds, its location and its agency. They recount an attempt at bourgeois demarcation, clinging to an alleged normality even as the world outside the windows is in turmoil.
The international group exhibition unfolds alongside a spatial intervention by artist Richard Venlet and brings together historical and new works by Nigin Beck, Rhea Dillon, Robert Haas, Hannah Höch, Alexandre Khondji, Atiéna R. Kilfa, Henry Koerner, Yoora Park, Patrick Jolley & Reynold Reynolds, Oskar Schlemmer, Renée Sintenis, Ian Waelder and Frau von Zinowiew.
Curated by Anna Gritz and Pia-Marie Remmers
+ Group Exhibitions:
Contact
info@dillonrhea.com
Soft Opening, London
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