Dan Hays
Biography
London-based artist Dan Hays makes images that present the natural world as tightly controlled, heavily mediated, and yet strangely seductive. Presented as views of animal cages painted in punchy heightened colours, or pixelated paintings of woodland that feature psychedelic effects, his techniques invest the domestic and the everyday with surprising new meanings.
The limited edition lenticular ‘Colorado Impression’ was published by Eyestorm in 2001 and was taken from a painting from a series of works of the same name that were inspired by low quality photographs of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado, USA, which Hays found on the Internet. The original painting now sits in the Tate’s permanent collection.
Born in 1966, Dan Hays has exhibited in solo and group shows both nationally and internationally since graduating from Goldsmiths College, London, with BA Fine Art in 1990, and has won various awards including the prestigious John Moores prize for painting in 1997. He later completed a PhD at Kingston University in 2012, which included the exhibition Screen as Landscape at the Stanley Picker Gallery. Recent group shows include Film in Space at Camden Arts Centre (2012) and Seeing Round Corners at Turner Contemporary, Margate (2016). In 2017 The Broadway Gallery in Letchworth Garden City hosted the solo show The Walk to the Paradise Garden.
Hays has given artist talks at around thirty art colleges and written papers for symposia at a range of institutions, as well as contributed features and reviews for a many publications, including The Journal of Contemporary Painting and The Moving Image Review & Art Journal.