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.
Currently, she is an Elaine G. Weitzen Studio Program Fellow at the Whitney Museum's Independent Study Program 2024–2025 in New York.
Current Exhibitions
Gestural Poethics Heidelberger Kunstverein, Germany 14 June – 7 September 2025
The Heidelberger Kunstverein is pleased to present Gestural Poethics, Rhea Dillon’s first institutional solo exhibition in Germany, offering a focused engagement with a central strand of her multifaceted artistic practice.
Curated by Søren Grammel. Programming by HdKV and additional Guest Curated Programming by Oré Arts × Afro Festival.
Statements: Art Basel Basel, Switzerland 17 June – 22 June 2025
Examining material and colonial histories, theories of minimalism and abstraction, and Black feminist epistemologies, Dillon’s sculptural practice considers the formation of Caribbean and British identities. Leaning Figures represents an extension, abstraction, and breakdown of both the Caribbean domestic dinnerware cabinet and the museological vitrine, with the former itself symbolising both boat and casket to engage with the history of the movement of Black bodies across water. In these wall-based sculptural works, sapele mahogany and glass-paneled boxes tightly house replicated versions of cut-crystal plates, newly cast in resin with either molasses, or soil from Jamaica. Enclosed and leaning inside these vitrines, Dillon’s reimagined glassware portrays Black bodies at rest. For more information or to request a preview, Soft Opening.
+ Group Exhibitions:
Accumulation –– On Collecting, Growth and Excess Migros Museum fur Gegenwartskunst, Zurich 14 June – 27 July 2025
The exhibited works illustrate the mechanisms of exploitation of natural resources in the Anthropocene – the age in which humans have become the central influencing factor of planetary processes. They show the toxic legacy of the fast-fashion industry – or the growing mountains of waste. They address global financial flows that intervene deeply in political and cultural processes. They reveal colonial narratives – such as the entanglement of mahogany wood with the violent history of the transatlantic slave trade. And they focus on digital infrastructures, such as underground cable systems that globally connect us to our present.
The second sequence of this exhibition also shows how new forms of resistance emerge from the ruptures of accumulation. The works on display visualize alternative strategies of care and collective responsibility towards people and the planet. Accumulation therefore invites visitors to think about new conceptions of society. With works by: Bare Minimum Collective, Wang Bing, Anne-Lise Coste (Uruk), Rhea Dillon, Rindon Johnson, Nils Amadeus Lange, Mimi Ọnụọha, Sandra Poulson, Daniel Arnan Quarshie und Raqs Media Collective.
Curated by Tasnim Baghdadi and Nadia Schneider Willen, with Paula Thomaka, as well as Linda Addae and Mirta Gianocca.
Contact
info@dillonrhea.com
Soft Opening, London
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