Pierre le Riche: My Body Is Not Your Temple: Solo Exhibition

Ronewa Art Projects is proud to present My body Is Not Your Temple, the second solo exhibition at the gallery by South African artist Pierre le Riche. Opening on September 11, the show features a powerful new series of wall textiles that continue le Riche’s deeply personal exploration of queer identity and themes of belonging, visibility, and vulnerability. 

Following on from his 2024 solo exhibition In Four Places At Once, My Body Is Not Your Temple deepens le Riche’s inquiry into the body as a site of identity and contradiction. Themes of gender and sexuality remain central to le Riche’s practice. He challenges conventional perceptions of masculinity and queer identities through a striking visual language that is often provocative and disarmingly intimate. 

On show at Ronewa will be Le Riche’s new series of tapestries that further develop the use of vibrant color, abstracted spatial dimensions, and contorted anonymous figures of his previous work. Here, his figures intersect with one another with overlapping forms, lines, and shifting color planes. Le Riche is investigating how our bodies interact with each other and, in particular, how queer bodies interact with the world. The figures are layered and fragmented by contrasting colors, as if cloaked in a “queered camouflage.” They are shapeshifters, moving between personal and public realms. 

Stylistically, le Riche’s characters are rudimentary and cartoonish, yet are emotionally fraught—often nude, contorted, and suspended in psychologically charged color spaces. Made entirely of tufted yarn, the tapestries foreground a material associated with domesticity and comfort, creating a tension between their tactile softness and the emotional weight his figures convey. The result is a body of work that is vivid and evocative, laced with tenderness, vulnerability, and intimacy.

Please join us and artist Pierre le Riche for the opening reception on Thursday, September 11, 2025, from 18:00 to 21:00. This evening coincides with the Berlin Art Week event ‘Gallery Night,’ in which numerous exhibitions open across the city, and particularly in our Schöneberg-Tiergarten art district. The exhibition continues through October 30, 2025.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Pierre le Riche (b. 1986, Gqeberha) holds a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Cape Town and has since worked as a full-time artist, curator, and potter. He has exhibited in solo and group shows across South Africa and abroad, participated in international art fairs, including 1-54 in London and AKAA in Paris, and created installations for global brands such as Daimler and Cartier. His large-scale textile installation Rainbow Rooms has been part of traveling exhibitions in the USA and China since 2018.