JAMES RIELLY (Wales, 1956). "With or without god on our side", 2017. Acrylic on canvas. Signed, dated and titled on the back. Measurements: 125 x 104.5 cm. James Rielly was born in Wales in 1956. He currently lives and works between Paris and the south of France. British painter James Rielly's highly characteristic works focus on the clichés, ideologies and metaphors of children. By creating subversive and sometimes surreal portraits of bright-eyed, school-aged youngsters, Rielly addresses notions of social tension and pictorial tradition. His best known series are Casual Influences (2000) and Sensible Ways (96-97), which consist of large-scale portraits inspired by stories and images taken from local newspaper articles. Through the act of highlighting certain characteristics and roles in children, Rielly's pieces highlight the dysfunctional nature of adults. Rielly has shown his paintings in a number of solo exhibitions since 1983, including the Nantes Museum of Fine Arts, Nantes, France, Spencer Brownstone Gallery, New York, Fond Regional d'Art Contemporain Auvergne, Clermont-Ferrand, Centro de Arte de Salamanca (CASA), Salamanca, Spain, Centre d'Art Neuchâtel, Switzerland, and Scott White Contemporary Art, La Jolla, CA, among many others. In 1995 he was awarded a MOMART fellowship at Tate Gallery and in 1997 he was shortlisted for the Jerwood Prize. He has been a professor of painting at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris, France since 2006.