Dan Rees

Dan Rees was born in 1982 in Swansea, Wales. He studied at Camberwell College of Arts in London from 2001 to 2004, then relocated to Germany in 2005. From 2007 to 2009 he trained at the Staatliche Hochschule fur Bildende Kunste Stadelschule in Frankfurt am Main, graduating in 2009. He is currently described in gallery materials as living and working in Berlin.

Rees works across painting, sculpture, and photography, and is best known for a body of paintings that mimic Artex, a textured plaster wall and ceiling coating common in postwar British homes, rendering a mundane building material as a subject for abstract painting. His practice extends this interest in banal, overlooked materials into sculpture and installation, often folding in readymade and appropriated objects.

His exhibition history includes a steady run of solo exhibitions from the 2010s onward with T293 in Rome and Tanya Leighton in Berlin and Los Angeles. A 2016 survey, Road Back to Relevance, at the Nomas Foundation in Rome, was framed by the gallery as a mid-career look back across his sculptural and installation work. He was included in Complex magazine's "25 Artists to Watch" list in 2013. No major juried art prizes are documented for him in available sources.

Coverage of Rees centers on his treatment of banal domestic materials, above all Artex, as a serious subject for painting, and on the way his sculpture and installation work extend that same interest in overlooked textures and readymade objects. His inclusion in Complex magazine's 2013 "25 Artists to Watch" list marked an early moment of broader visibility, and the Nomas Foundation's 2016 survey, Road Back to Relevance, was presented by the institution as tracing the development of that practice across a decade of work. His exhibition history with T293 in Rome and with Tanya Leighton in Berlin and Los Angeles reflects sustained gallery support rather than a single breakout moment.

Public auction data for Dan Rees is limited and inconsistent across secondary sources. His Artex Painting series has appeared in Phillips day sales in London and New York. Phillips catalogue data points to a lot result of about GBP 40,000 for an Artex Painting at a February 2014 London day sale, while a 2014 New York Times report separately cited GBP 56,250 as the top bid at a Phillips London sale in the same period. A 2015 Observer article referenced a USD 233,000 price for an Artex painting sold in a separate, unspecified sale, a figure this profile cannot independently verify. Given these inconsistencies across sources, no single confirmed all-time auction record, meaning one specific work, price, house, and sale date, can be stated here.

No catalogue raisonne has been identified for Dan Rees, so provenance and authentication questions should be directed to his representing gallery, Tanya Leighton, and his frequent exhibition partner, T293. His public auction footprint is thin and inconsistently documented in available market sources, which means collectors should treat any single reported sale figure with caution rather than as a settled benchmark. His strongest signal of durability is institutional: his work sits in the collections of the Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore College, the National Museum Wales, and the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle, alongside a continuous run of gallery solo exhibitions since the mid-2010s.