Dan Withey

Dan Withey lives in Tarntanyangga–Adelaide.

Born in Birmingham, England, Withey migrated to South Australia in 2004 as a teenager. Following the completion of his degree in illustration, Withey has worked as a full-time artist.

Withey’s art practice draws on graphic art, storytelling, illustration and patterning to explore thresholds between the imagination and ‘reality’, representation and decoration, inner worlds and the public sphere. Primarily working in acrylic paint, alongside ink and pencil, Withey creates vivid, playful and surreal compositions that recall the absurdity of dreamscapes while traversing the domestic and the fantastic.

Veering between abstraction and figuration, sometimes within a single work, Withey’s paintings adopt a humorous, even irreverent, attitude. The strangeness encapsulated in Withey’s paintings reflects the experience of contemporary life, existential angst and their effects on the human subject.

Favouring clean lines, fine detail and flat colours, Withey builds complex compositions that explore spatial relationships rather than pictorial illusion or geometric modes of representation.

Central to Withey’s formal approach is the juxtaposition of scale, bold colours and intricate patterning. Recurrent motifs include birds, cats, robots, rainbows, elements of nature and architecture, simplified human figures, and emblems of renewal.