James Rielly 
Born in 1956 in Wrexham, Wales
Lives and works in Paris and southwestern France
James Rielly studied at Gloucester College of Art & Design in Cheltenham and Belfast College of Art. He was workshop leader at the Beaux-Arts in Paris, where he mentored generations of young painters. 

In the 1990s, James Rielly was associated with the Young British Artists movement and in 1997 took part in the landmark exhibition organized by the Saatchi brothers, Sensation, which celebrated this generation and toured London, Berlin, and New York. He moved to France in the early 2000s. He paints portraits, landscapes, houses, ghosts, skeletons... He draws inspiration from art history of all periods, fairy tales and legends, cinema, literature, and his encounters with people to create a highly personal body of work. His brightly colored paintings are like almost surrealist stories, freeze frames in which he questions childhood, the passage of time, and issues of identity, playing on the absurd, cruelty, and the strange. His works have been exhibited extensively in France and internationally and are part of important private and public collections. The CAC Malaga dedicated a retrospective to him in 2022. 

James Rielly said: “I like simple stories that hide something. In stories and tales, there is always a part that is told, and another that is not, that lies dormant within us. And that's what I like to find in my work.”