Nick Dawes South Africa, b. 1969

Nick Dawes was born in 1969 in Johannesburg, South Africa, and lives and works in London. After completing a foundation course at Gloucestershire College of Art and Technology, he graduated with a BA in Fine Art from Brighton Polytechnic in 1992. His formation placed him within a British art education tradition that valued material experimentation and conceptual rigor, and it is precisely these two qualities that have defined his practice in the decades since.

Dawes works without a brush. His paintings are made exclusively by pouring thin layers of paint onto untreated canvas, a method he has refined over more than thirty years into a practice of remarkable precision and depth. The process begins with language: a single word, often drawn from the visual vocabulary of the Highway Code or everyday street signage, serves as the conceptual seed from which each work grows. Color and form appropriated from these sources are then abstracted through successive poured layers that penetrate, diffuse, and run across the canvas surface, generating a translucent visual dynamic in which solid components dissolve into fluid, organic shapes. The brush is never used. What remains is a surface in which time is visibly inscribed, where each layer records the moment of its making and the interaction between pigment, gravity, and the untreated fabric beneath. Conceptually, Dawes' work enters into a sustained dialogue with key positions of postwar abstract painting, including Ed Clark, Mark Rothko, and Sam Gilliam, without quoting them directly. His practice carries their inquiries into color, space, and materiality forward 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 characterize his current phase of work.

Nick 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 UK, Germany, Belgium, Spain, and the United States, including the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia. His paintings have been shown in institutional and gallery contexts in London and Southampton, including the Cell Project Space in London, the John Hansard Gallery in Southampton, and Galerie Lucy Mackintosh in Lausanne.

Dawes has exhibited widely across Europe and North America. His work has been presented at major international art fairs including EXPO Chicago, Untitled Art Fair in Miami Beach, Art021 in Shanghai, and the KIAF Art Fair in Seoul. He has also participated in group exhibitions at 68projects in Berlin and in the gallery context of KORNFELD Galerie Berlin's broader program.

Nick Dawes is represented by KORNFELD Galerie Berlin, with whom he has maintained a sustained 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 Aheadmarking the gallery's tenth anniversary (2022). Most recently, KORNFELD Galerie Berlin mounted the solo exhibition Trace Elements from March to April 2026, curated by Charles Moore, bringing together new works that affirm Dawes' commitment to a painterly approach that consciously resists the visual acceleration of the present.

With each new body of work, Nick Dawes deepens a practice that is as philosophically grounded as it is visually immediate, one in which slowness, transparency, and material attention remain the defining terms.