Nick Dawes South Africa, b. 1969

Nick Dawes (born 1969 in Johannesburg, South Africa) lives and works in London. He first studied at Gloucestershire College of Art and Technology before completing a BA in Fine Art at Brighton Polytechnic in 1992. His education placed him within a British art-school tradition that emphasised material experimentation and conceptual rigour, and it is precisely these two qualities that have shaped his work over the decades since.

Dawes works without a brush. His paintings are created exclusively by pouring thin layers of paint onto untreated canvas, a method he has refined over more than thirty years into a practice of striking precision and depth. Each painting begins with a single word, often taken from the visual language of the Highway Code or from everyday street signage, which serves as the conceptual starting point. Colour and form appropriated from these sources are then translated into successive poured layers that penetrate, diffuse and run across the canvas, generating a translucent visual field in which solid elements disperse into fluid, organic shapes.

What remains is a surface in which time is visibly inscribed: each layer records the moment of its making and the interaction between pigment, gravity and raw fabric. Conceptually, Dawes’s work engages key positions in post-war abstract painting, including Ed Clark, Mark Rothko and Sam Gilliam, without citing them directly. His practice extends their investigations into colour, space and materiality with consistency and clarity, asserting painting as a site of concentrated perception and temporal experience. Works such as Beam (2025), Bridge (2024), Track (2023) and w/B41 (2023) exemplify the formal intelligence and quiet intensity that characterise his current phase.

Dawes was nominated for the Celeste Art Prize in 2006, an early marker of international critical attention. His works are held in public and private collections across the United Kingdom, Germany, Belgium, Spain and the United States, including the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia. His paintings have been exhibited in institutional and gallery contexts in London, Southampton and Lausanne, among them Cell Project Space in London, John Hansard Gallery in Southampton and Galerie Lucy Mackintosh in Lausanne.

Dawes has exhibited widely across Europe, North America and Asia. His work has been presented at major international art fairs such as EXPO Chicago, Untitled Art in Miami Beach, Art021 in Shanghai and KIAF in Seoul. He has also participated in group exhibitions at 68projects in Berlin and throughout the wider programme of KORNFELD Galerie Berlin.

Nick Dawes and KORNFELD Galerie Berlin have developed a long-standing and productive relationship. The gallery has presented his work across multiple formats, including the double solo show Nick Dawes + Susanne Roewer (2019), the solo exhibition Between Boundaries (2021) and the group exhibition Looking Back Ahead, marking the gallery’s tenth anniversary (2022). Most recently, KORNFELD Galerie Berlin hosted his solo exhibition Trace Elements (March–April 2026), curated by Charles Moore, bringing together new works that affirm his commitment to a painterly approach that consciously resists the visual acceleration of the present.

With each new body of work, Dawes deepens a practice that is both philosophically grounded and visually immediate, in which slowness, transparency and material attention remain defining concerns.