Painter Thomas Dillon Explores Myth & Meaning in Dubai Exhibition

Opera Gallery Dubai is presenting 'The Raw and the Cooked', the first solo exhibition in Dubai by American artist Thomas Dillon. On view from October 23rd to November 17th, the exhibition introduces a new body of work made specifically for this occasion.

Born in Staten Island in 1986 and based in Philadelphia, Dillon is a self-taught painter whose path to art began through music and writing. His process is intuitive and reflective, often starting with moments of stillness and meditation before paint meets canvas. Layer by layer, he builds compositions where abstraction and structure overlap, revealing traces of rhythm, movement, and deliberation.

The exhibition’s title, drawn from Claude Lévi-Strauss’s study of Amerindian mythology, 'The Raw and the Cooked', offers a framework for understanding Dillon’s work. Much like Lévi-Strauss examined how opposites give shape to meaning, Dillon explores tension between instinct and reason, gesture and form. His paintings suggest that even in a digital world, the physical act of painting remains a direct way of thinking and feeling through material.