Dan Rees

Can you describe your work in three words? 
Aesthetic and Conceptual.

What got you into the arts? How did you become an artist? 
At school, I would spend most of my free time filling in my art books with collage, drawing, and painting. I would work on them for hours, often staying indoors during the summer holidays to finish things. I was very drawn to the combination of visual seduction and intellectual articulation. In this sense, art felt intoxicating to me, and I never really considered another path. I was naïve, of course and for some reason, I assumed that what I understood as art’s countercultural relevance meant it was somehow a working-class pursuit. I had automatically associated being less well-off with being culturally subversive, an idea I probably absorbed from bands. So when I got to art school, I was genuinely shocked at how privileged most of the students were. It only really dawned on me then that making art was seen as a financial risk and that this reality excluded a lot of people.

Your practice involves a variety of media including painting, photography and performance and you have described yourself as a 'conceptual artist who is invested in abstract painting'. Can you talk more about what draws you to painting as a medium?
I studied painting at Camberwell, but by my second year almost no one was painting. By the time we left, we were all quite dismissive of the medium. My final show ended up being photography. After art school, I moved straight to Berlin and worked for Jonathan Monk. In many ways, that became a second education, an immersion into the conceptual practices of the late 1960s and early 1970s. I was instantly captivated. I still think of that moment as pivotal in art’s development: everything since has flowed downstream from its linguistic, anti-aesthetic, cognitive, political, feminist, and philosophical revolutions. It was only after five years of working in other media that I began to reintegrate painting into my practice. I was particularly drawn to abstraction, because it carried a difficult aura within contemporary art. Much of conceptual art had sought to move away from the heroic, masculine domain of abstraction, towards the social. My aim has been to re-engage with painting while keeping the social very much in mind, particularly in relation to class concerns and ideas about so-called “low” or decorative arts. My work remains coded in a distinctly British, and even Welsh register. I always have Swansea in mind.

You were born in Wales but you've been living in Berlin for several years. Your works often make reference to aspects of Welsh history and culture. Does place play an important role in your practice?
Moving to Berlin was freeing because everything was new. Even not understanding the language helped. In the UK, I was often deeply affected by what I overheard. In Swansea especially it could feel threatening just to walk around looking and dressing slightly differently. I always felt like a fish out of water there, and dreaming of Dylan Thomas wasn’t going to change that. I’ve also found British culture to be quite oppressive: it dominates so much. Entering a different culture made me realise how much of an 'industry' culture really is. Berlin, for me, was a place of disconnection. That lack of rootedness reflected my own inner disposition, and it allowed me to develop a somewhat idealised perspective on Wales. When I visited my grandmother, to whom I was very close, she recalled the city before it was flattened in the war and rebuilt quickly and unsympathetically in the 1960s. She offered me another perspective on Swansea, one rooted in culture, in a place not so obviously riven with social problems. A lot of my interest in class issues stems from this perspective of Swansea. So much of the social reform we take for granted in the UK was forged in these industrial heartlands. It feels emotional for me. Even though I am still disconnected to it, it’s the closest place I have a ‘home’, even if the roots are a bit tangled. 

You've been producing Artex works since 2011. Can you tell us about the origins of this series? Has your relationship to these works changed since you started making them almost fifteen years ago? 
My bedroom in my grandmother’s flat in Swansea had an Artex ceiling. I struggled with insomnia for a long time and would stare up at the ceiling and trace these impossible patterns. They became etched into my mind. The first Artex paintings came about almost without thought. I enjoyed using a tool rather than a brush, and applying expensive oil paint in a casual way. As I began to reflect on the works, I realised I wanted them to tread a fine line between the seductive and the repellent, the beautiful and the jarring. Right from the start, I imagined them hanging in a collector’s home in Miami or LA. I wanted the Artex pattern to infiltrate expensive interiors. It was almost a kind of revenge of interior decorating and a reversal of the influence of US culture on British life. In the UK during the yuppie era, Artex became heavily class-coded and quickly deemed out-dated. It was often the first thing people stripped out when buying a house. Like pebble-dash, it became a powerful signifier, potent, yet rarely addressed. After about seven or eight years, I asked some collectors to photograph these paintings in situ. For me this completed a conceptual circle: these works installed amongst other artworks and high-end furniture.

You started working with the marbling technique in 2022. Can you tell us what interested you about marbling, and more about the ideas and process behind these works?
These works came about after lockdown, a very hard time to make art. I have always needed to respond to things happening in the world, to see exhibitions and be in conversation with other work. What struck me during that period was how art was framed as something to decorate our inner worlds, as a comfort or compensation: “we need art now more than ever.” The marble works were my way of responding to that. It felt important to explore how craft and hobbyist practices were being embraced at that time, and what this revealed about art’s place in society. My process is precarious. Dipping canvases into ink on water gives me a certain degree of control, but it is fragile. As a result, many works remain around 70% complete, lingering in the studio until I find a way forward. I tend to work in groups, allowing the paintings to inform each other like a constellation, one sets a direction, and the others respond. That is how I like to imagine them. For my solo show with Canopy Collections, I have focused on framing elements and incorporating decorative motifs, particularly the Welsh blanket pattern. It interests me how craft traditions become a badge of authenticity, only to be commercialised in return. This dynamic is emblematic of neoliberalism.

What do you hope to capture and convey through your work? 
There have been times when I’ve been upset by what I felt were misunderstandings of my work, but I’ve learned to let go of that. It often takes me some reflective time to understand what I have been trying to do, and of course their meanings shift over time. The one consistent thing that I hope comes across is a sense of critical engagement with the history of art itself. I feel deeply invested in art as a critical discourse, and there is so much art that I genuinely admire and respect.

Who are the artists who have inspired you the most? 
I am currently writing a series of essays on artists whose work I appreciate. Allan Sekula’s Fish Story remains exemplary for me: an expansive, sensitive, and discursive investigation into the effects of globalisation. Its ability to hold together aesthetic form, political critique, and historical class-consciousness is inspiring. I also find Tony Cokes’ work deeply instructive. Most recently, I have been immersing myself in the work of Lynn Hershman Leeson. Many of her projects present themselves as fully formed intellectual worlds. The Electronic Diaries in particular feels both moving and dialectically sophisticated in its treatment of subject formation and mediation. 

Do you collect from other artists? How important is it for you to live with art? 
I have a few works that I’ve swapped with other artists. Now that I have a more stable living environment, we really enjoy having art on the walls. It feels important, but I also try not to be too precious about it. My partner is an artist as well, she has a sharp eye and can really draw in a way I cannot, I’d like to have more of her work on the walls.

Any projects in the pipeline? 
My solo show Dreambox of Another Kind opens at Canopy Collections HQ this September. I took the title from the poet Alfred Starr Hamilton, someone my partner introduced me too. He spent much of his life in obscurity, so gets the ‘outsider poet’ label attached to him. His work has a sense of freedom and metaphysical playfulness, which I really appreciate, as well as his aesthetic sensibility attuned to strangeness. It’s a very loose association but I think it lends something to the works I will be showing. They represent a development for me, because they are attempting to really stand on their own, and sort of speak in their own muted way.