Dan Rees
French Cricket
11 September – 23 October 2010, Tanya Leighton, Berlin
*"My idea is for an animation to act as a focus of a thesis, I thought of a young frog named Charles who has a melancholy donkey as a best friend, this frog likes to pass his time playing French cricket, reading extensively (poetry) and is prone to bouts of solitude, (pond)erings and passionate longings, if only he had an outlet for his thoughts... how far could these scrawny legs take him?
I like French Cricket as a title to add a bit exoticism, like French bread is better than just bread, or a French kiss is nicer than a German or even an English kiss. Here the French represents doing something wrong, someone playing cricket that looks so wrong and messed up it must be French.
Interstellar Activity is a state of being after having drunk many many cans of Stella Artois, your head spins on a axis and for a moment you feel free from the shackles and chains, free from the internal conflict between what you believe in and what you are forced to accept, between your ideas and dreams and the dead forms and phantoms, between your gut desires and what you eat…until of course it wears off and you lose all comfort and joy of life." *– Dan Rees.
Dan Rees (b. 1982 Swansea, U.K.), lives and works in Berlin. Rees studied at the Staatliche Hochschule fur Bildende Künste Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main 2007-9, and graduated from Camberwell College of Arts, London in 2004.
Recent solo exhibitions include: ‘Dan Rees’, Zinger Presents, Amsterdam (2010); ‘They Don’t Make Them Like This Anymore’, T293, Naples (2009); ‘Dan Rees / Fredrik Værslev - Shelf Paintings (Pottery in October)’, Standard (Oslo) (2009); ‘Junk On a Thing’, Johan Berggren Gallery, Malmö (2009); Art Statements, Art 40 Basel (with T293, Naples)(2009).
Recent group exhibitions include: ‘Exhibition, Exhibition’ (curated by Adam Carr), Castello di Rivoli, Turin (2010); ‘Before and After’, Balice Hertling (2010), Paris; ‘A Very, Very Long Cat’, Wallspace Gallery, New York (2010); ‘Berlin Los Angeles A Tale of Two (other) Cities’, Massimo De Carlo, Milan (2010); ‘Richard Prince and the Revolution’, ProjecteSD, Barcelona (curated by Jonathan Monk) (2009); ‘Without’, Galerie Yvon Lambert, Paris (2009); ‘Some Time Waiting’, Kadist Art Foundation, Paris (2009).