James Rielly

JAMES RIELLY (Wales, 1956).
"Tolerance for ambiguity", 2025.
Oil on canvas.
Signed, dated and titled on the back.
With certificate signed by the artist of the Romero Paprocki Gallery.
Measurements: 61 x 51 cm; 65.5 x 56 cm (frame).

James Rielly is known for his portraits and figurative scenes of intimate and melancholic atmosphere, in which he combines a realistic style with a poetic and dreamy sensibility. Trained at the Glasgow School of Art, his work is characterized by the use of soft colors, subdued lighting and delicate compositions that often depict children, adolescents and female figures in quiet, contemplative moments, which has brought him international prestige within contemporary figurative painting. By creating subversive and sometimes surreal portraits of bright-eyed, school-aged youth, Rielly addresses notions of social tension and pictorial tradition. His best known series are Casual Influences (2000) and Sensible Ways (96-97), which consist of large-scale portraits inspired by stories and images taken from local newspaper articles. Through the act of highlighting certain characteristics and roles in children, Rielly's pieces highlight the dysfunctional nature of adults. Rielly has shown his paintings in a number of solo exhibitions since 1983, including the Nantes Museum of Fine Arts, Nantes, France, Spencer Brownstone Gallery, New York, Fond Regional d'Art Contemporain Auvergne, Clermont-Ferrand, Centro de Arte de Salamanca (CASA), Salamanca, Spain, Centre d'Art Neuchâtel, Switzerland, and Scott White Contemporary Art, La Jolla, CA, among many others. In 1995 he was awarded a MOMART fellowship at Tate Gallery and in 1997 he was shortlisted for the Jerwood Prize. He has been a professor of painting at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris, France since 2006.