Thomas Dillon, 'The Raw and the Cooked'

Opera Gallery Dubai

23 October - 17 November 2025

Opera Gallery Dubai is delighted to present 'The Raw and the Cooked', the first solo exhibition in Dubai by Thomas Dillon. This exhibition marks an important milestone in the artist’s career and introduces to our region a body of work conceived and created entirely for this occasion.

The title, borrowed from Claude Lévi-Strauss’s influential text, is more than a reference; it offers a conceptual lens through which Dillon’s paintings may be read. In his structural analysis of myth, Lévi-Strauss identified binary oppositions—nature and culture, raw and cooked—as fundamental tools by which societies organize meaning.

Dillon, in his own way, adopts and transforms this framework, testing the limits of painting as a medium that can bridge instinct and intellect, gesture and structure, matter and form.

'The Raw and the Cooked' is an invitation to witness an artist at a pivotal moment, presenting a body of work that is at once deeply personal and conceptually expansive.

Dillon’s paintings remind us that art continues to operate like myth: as a space where chaos is given form, where the elemental becomes symbolic, and where human thought—raw and cooked alike—finds its most resonant expression.