Midcity, Los Angeles
Dan Rees
Enormous Changes at the Last Minute
Tanya LeightonTanya Leighton, Los Angeles is pleased to present Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, a solo exhibition by Berlin-based artist Dan Rees. We warmly invite you to join us for light refreshments and snacks to celebrate. Rees’s new body of works build upon his recent experiments with marbling, an image-making technique that for the artist lies somewhere between painting, printmaking and photography. The process, Rees explains, “reminds me of developing from negatives, preparing the inks on the surface of water, dipping the different canvases into baths, hosing them down, hanging them up to dry and waiting for the result to emerge.” Requiring continuous reflection, Rees repeats the ink application process over many weeks until he finds the right balance of forms. “It is often the case that in the making of a new piece all the previous works will be rendered incomplete by comparison and will be subjected to further revision,” Rees explains. Enormous Changes at the Last Minute therefore builds upon an ongoing concern in the artist’s practice to foreground technique and subsume individual works under a collective conceptual unity. Dan Rees (b. 1982 in Swansea, Wales) lives and works in Berlin. Rees studied at the Staatliche Hochschule fur Bildende Künste – Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main until 2009 and graduated from Camberwell College of Arts, London in 2004. Entangled with pop culture and art historical references, Rees’s multifaceted practice is in constant dialogue with the context around him, rendering dynamic and conceptually oriented works. Drawing from his childhood memories in Swansea, but also engaging concepts from abstraction and modernity, he has a process-driven approach that engenders innovative forms of art-making. His most recent solo exhibition ‘Aleatory Compensatory’ opened at Tanya Leighton, Berlin in March 2023. Other recent exhibitions of Rees’s work include ‘The Beauty of Early Life’ at ZKM Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe and ‘Omnibus’ at Kinderhook & Caracas, Berlin both in 2022; ‘World Art Trends 1982’ at Nuno Centeno, Porto in 2021; ‘Attachment’ at T293, Rome in 2018, and ‘Road Back To Relevance’, Nomas Foundation, Rome in 2016. Rees’s work is in major public collections including Tang Museum, Skidmore College, New York; National Museum, Wales; and the Henry Art Gallery Collection, Seattle.