James Rielly: Life of Rielly

Timothy Taylor Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by British artist James Rielly. It will be the artist’s first solo exhibition in London since 2003 and will include a large body of new paintings and the artist’s first wall installation.
 
Rielly draws inspiration from newspaper images and amateur photographs, showing children and adults in situations that hover between the humdrum and the bizarre, decontextualised by the removal of any narrative link. This exhibition’s title ‘Life of Rielly’ reflects the pervasion of the artist’s ever-present black sense of humour in his work, but there is also an underlying seriousness.
 
In 1966, Wales was struck by the desperate tragedy of Aberfan, when 116 children were killed after a coal slag heap buried a school. The Minister of State for Wales said at the time that "A generation of children has been wiped out". An image based on a memory of this disaster appears in a large painting by Rielly; a black pyramid ominously suffocating the tender flesh pink of a house.
 
‘In the search for a subject to paint, when it is a matter not of expression but of actually saying something – it is quite unusual to find a young artist like James Rielly mention, as part of the early background to his work, his interest in painting a story and his desire to follow part of his studies in Belfast so as to be in the thick of history in the making without, as he openly admits, going there to take sides – what counts is just a pile of photographic documents, as if that is what represents the truth of society.’
Francoise Cohen, ‘Contre-Images’, Carré d’Art, Nîmes, 2003