DALLAS, TX.- The Goss-Michael Foundation recently announced that British-born Dan Rees had been invited to be the first ‘resident’ artist to live for a selected period of time in Dallas and create original work for the Foundation. In an effort to engage the local community and to develop a creative dialogue, area art students were invited to meet the artist and watch the process of production.

The residency culminates in a one-man show at The Goss-Michael Foundation.

“We are delighted that Dan has been selected as our first ‘artist in residence’, providing students and the public with the opportunity to view art from the beginning to completion,” said Joyce Goss, Executive Director, The Goss-Michael Foundation. “Dan has a uniquely intimate collection of works and he is a true original. This project and the resulting show underlines The Goss-Michael Foundation’s commitment to presenting and educating art lovers with the best in contemporary British art.”

Rees plays with the boundaries between what can be considered painting, installation or sculpture and focuses on the process-related aspects of his work. He uses subtle and explicit strategies of appropriation, often with humour to challenge the dominant narrative of art history.

For one of his works, A Good Idea Is A Good Idea, Rees reproduced famous oeuvres by Malevich, Mondrian, and de Kooning, among others, on several copies of the Beatles’ White Album covers. Rees’ admiration for these artists seems to also contain a sense of frustration; a feeling related to the struggling research that most contemporary artists have to undertake in order to find their voice in the shade of the masters. In particular, Rees emphasizes the need to position his work in relation to the over-idealized heritage of conceptual art, which is extremely influential in the development of contemporary art.

Rees describes art as a feeling of freedom “between what you believe in and what you are forced to accept, between your ideas and dreams and the dead forms and phantoms.”

Rees often uses materials that are not usually used for “fine art,” such as plasticine and artex. Plasticine is a putty -like modeling material used extensively for children's play, but also as a modeling medium for sculpture. Artex is a material that was used widely in the ‘70s for house decoration to create the familiar textured finish of that period. Imbued with elements of nostalgia and cultural history, both mediums are chosen for the strong references and then used paradoxically as the actual medium for “fine art.”

By taking his materials from the real world with its popular cultural references and messy, dirty materials, like plasticine or the artex plaster that adorns his grandmother’s ceiling in Wales and other working class interiors across the UK, Rees pushes the barriers between high and low art to move away from the hermeticism and elitism of the art world.

Rees studied at the Staatliche Hochshule fur Bildende Künste Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main 2007 through 2009 and graduated in 2004 from Camberwell College of Arts in London. Currently living and working in Berlin, he chooses to work not with the glamorous low art elements of pop art, but rather elements associated with the grim working class of suburbia where he grew up. His work carries nostalgic elements of both intimate and collective memory.