DILLON MISTRY
COMMON THREAD
2025
Solo show at PATCH Places, Bournemouth
Common Thread brings together paintings and sculptural pieces that echo a personal and cultural lineage, drawing from family, heritage, and memory.
Figure and visual emotion centre this body of work. Through oil paint and occasional sculpture, the human form becomes a vessel for exploring relationships, nostalgia, belonging, identity, and the fragility of perception. Each piece carries echoes of the past, yet remains open for interpretation from viewers to project their own histories, biases, emotions and contexts.
This exhibition doesn’t follow a single path. It reflects different stages of growth, experimentation, and learning. Early works sit alongside more refined pieces, showing not just progress in technique but in thought. What ties them together is quiet curiosity: How do we see? What baggage do we bring with us when we look? And what happens when personal memories meet shared views?
AUB Grad Show
2025
This body of work marks the end of my university journey and the beginning of something new.
It explores the emotional weight of relationships, the fluidity of time, and the raw materiality of oil paint, where memory, feeling, and form merge on the surface.
The work explores family and identity through archival family photography, merging different time frames to create cross-generational narratives. These paintings reflect on relationships and shared histories, drawing from the materiality of paint to reimagine memory. This exploration has sparked a shift in my practice—my approach is now more deliberate and intentional. Compositions are carefully constructed, and each brushstroke holds meaning, contributing to a deeper narrative within the work. Experimentation with technique has introduced a new visual language, one that is both reflective and forward-looking. Through this process, I aim to challenge traditional ideas of nostalgia, inviting viewers to engage with the fluidity of memory and the connections that bind us across time.
THE OBSERVED BODY
2025
The Observed Body – an exhibition I had the pleasure of curating alongside the brilliant work of myself, Cat Lees, and Amelia Mitchell.
This show brings life drawing, a practice often kept behind studio doors, into public view. It’s quiet, raw, and essential to how we understand form, gesture, and presence.
Thank you to everyone who came and engaged with the work.
Below is my Artist Bio from the exhibition:
Dillon Mistry’s work in this exhibition centres on life drawing as a core component of his artistic practice. Though primarily a painter, working mainly in oils, Mistry consistently returns to drawing—particularly with charcoal—as a way to sharpen his technical skills and deepen his understanding of the human form.
The works presented here are not finished pieces in the traditional sense, but rather studies created as part of an ongoing commitment to practice and observation. Through these drawings, Mistry explores anatomy, movement, and proportion, using each session as a way to inform and evolve his painted work. The figure plays a central role across his broader practice, and these life studies offer a candid look into the process that supports and shapes his larger compositions.
MAGPIE
2024
MAGPIE was a site-specific exhibition created and presented by like-minded peers on my BA Fine Art course. The exhibition was a collective response to The Russell-Cotes Gallery/ Museum. The works were all made individually, exploring personal themes regarding the Russell-Cotes' vast collection.
My exhibit was a sculpture made of copper, along with an accompanying moving image film. They both explored personal narratives and a deep exploration of culture and identity. I created a discussion between my work and the Russel-Cotes' collection. It interrupted the space and encouraged a deeper look to figure out what it was about. It successfully commented on themes of identity, culture, religion, and the confusion that comes with all of that. I am very happy with the narratives created in this piece and how it all materialised in the end. The exhibition was an opportunity for my creative practice to expand, and I could explore cultural identity more than I ever had before. The Russell-Cotes is home to a vast Victorian collection of artefacts, sculptures, paintings and more. The Hindu sculptures in the Yellow-Room, are what inspired this project.
BIZARRE BAZAAR
2023
Bizarre Bazaar was an exhibition created by an art collective that consisted of peers on my BA Fine Art Course. It was an event organised and created by my peers and me to showcase our work from that term. For this exhibition, I presented the work 'Camembert.' It was a result of experimentation with themes of memory and relationships. It showcased a developed understanding of material, line, shape, and form.
Press Release:
Dillon Mistry is a Fine Art student from Watford who generally works with digital media and traditional painting. However, for the piece ‘Camembert’, he used charcoal, ink, and acrylic paint. ‘Camembert,' comments on themes of connection and memory, as well as being very expressive and dynamic. Mistry has a diaristic approach to his practice, and this is evident in this piece.