Dan Rees works across a variety of media including painting, photography, performance art and sculpture to create conceptual and process-driven works. He is best known for his series of Artex paintings, which he started in 2011 and rapidly gained international acclaim. Artex is a surface coating which was widely used in 1970s Britain to add texture to interior walls and ceilings. It is a material that adorns working class homes in the UK and forms part of the decoration of a certain social demographic, at the same time beautiful and gaudy. In his most recent series of works, Rees has employed the somewhat unpredictable technique of marbling to produce paintings that reference the aesthetics of traditional papercraft and bookmaking. These conceptual marbled linen works, like the Artex works, are imbued with a subtle subversion of aesthetic hierarchies which is characteristic of Rees’ skill for combining the language of abstraction with cultural history.

Rees’s work is held in public and private collections worldwide including The Bass, Miami; Goss Michael Foundation, Dallas; National Museum of Wales, Cardiff; Vanhaerents Art Collection, Brussels; Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin. He has exhibited at Centre Pompidou, Paris; MOSTYN, Wales; Nomas Foundation, Rome; GAMeC, Bergamo; Castello di Rivoli, Turin; National Museum of Wales, Cardiff; White Columns, New York; Tanya Leighton, Berlin; Canopy Collections, London; Standard, Oslo.