My Body Is Not Your Temple' – a solo exhibition by South African artist Pierre le Riche.

This will be the gallery's second solo presentation of le Riche's vivid, evocative, and intimate textile works, continuing his deeply personal exploration of queer identities and belonging.
Le Riche's new tapestries on show investigate how our bodies interact with each other and, in particular, how queer bodies interact with the world.

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.