“Stimulate Surprise” was Dan Rees’s fourth solo show at Tanya Leighton, and his second without any of the abstract paintings for which he’s best known. The exhibition consisted of six three-dimensional works and two videos, all addressing tropes of industry (specifically agriculture), advertising, and global trade. Though this thematic framework could have said a lot about the artist’s own industrious output of paintings, their signature Artex—a material otherwise most often used in texturing ceilings—finish and their proliferation on the market and in digital reproduction, here it

“Ambiguity points to the mystery of all revealing”—the title of Harm van den Dorpel’s recent solo show—is taken from Martin Heidegger’s 1954 essay “The Question Concerning Technology.” Deprived of its context, the line itself becomes ambiguous, an empty shell to be filled with any random meaning—and exemplifies the artist’s practice of collage for the digital age. A programmer-cum-artist, Van den Dorpel, born in 1981, is generally associated with the so-called post-Internet generation. The rationale behind this label seems to be that there’s been a shift in sensibility between