Dan Rees works across a variety of media—including painting, photography, performance and sculpture—to create conceptual and process-driven works. He is best known for his Artex paintings, a series begun in 2011 that quickly gained international recognition. Artex, a textured surface coating widely used in 1970s Britain, is closely associated with working-class homes and a particular social aesthetic—at once decorative, utilitarian, and faintly gaudy. Rees repurposes this culturally loaded material to probe questions of taste, beauty and class. In his more recent series, Rees turns to the unpredictable technique of marbling to produce paintings that echo the aesthetics of traditional papercraft and bookbinding. These marbled linen works, like the Artex series before them, carry a subtle subversion of aesthetic hierarchies, exemplifying Rees’s ability to merge the language of abstraction with cultural history.

Rees’ work is held in international private and public collections, including The Bass, Miami; Goss Michael Foundation, Dallas; National Museum of Wales, Cardiff; Vanhaerents Art Collection, Brussels; Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin; Tang Museum, New York. 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; Saatchi Gallery, London; Galeria Nuno Centeno, Porto; T293 Gallery, Rome.