PIERRE LE RICHE
SOLO EXHIBITION - MY BODY IS NOT YOUR TEMPLE
Gallery opening:
• September 11, 2025
• Time: 18:00 - 21:00
Exhibition dates:
• September 12 - November 1, 2025
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.
