Dan Rees: Think Local, Act Global
Dan Rees engages with a tradition of conceptual art making, in which familiar tropes and genres 鈥� monochromes, abstracts, ready-mades 鈥� are quietly unhinged and recuperated as strategies for production. The exhibition鈥檚 central series of Artex Paintings revive a decorative ceiling pattern, popular in British working class homes during the 1970s. Creating this type of plasterwork, once a skilled manual job, has now been rendered all but redundant as the material fell out of fashion during the late 1980s. Rees鈥� methodology is driven through both a recognition of the steady disappearance of the working class over recent decades and the overwriting of much of its history, as much of the disappearance of artex as a decorative mean itself. Within Rees鈥� paintings, distinctive shell-like patterns are combed through energetically coloured fields. Incidental manifestations within the fluid oil register against the formal exercise of combing, which both obliterates and transforms the painted surface beneath.
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Dan Rees engages with a tradition of conceptual art making, in which familiar tropes and genres 鈥� monochromes, abstracts, ready-mades 鈥� are quietly unhinged and recuperated as strategies for production. The exhibition鈥檚 central series of Artex Paintings revive a decorative ceiling pattern, popular in British working class homes during the 1970s. Creating this type of plasterwork, once a skilled manual job, has now been rendered all but redundant as the material fell out of fashion during the late 1980s. Rees鈥� methodology is driven through both a recognition of the steady disappearance of the working class over recent decades and the overwriting of much of its history, as much of the disappearance of artex as a decorative mean itself. Within Rees鈥� paintings, distinctive shell-like patterns are combed through energetically coloured fields. Incidental manifestations within the fluid oil register against the formal exercise of combing, which both obliterates and transforms the painted surface beneath.
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