Artist Feature: Dima Rebus
"a dialogue shaped by place, mood, memory, and time"
Dima Rebus is a contemporary artist whose practice explores the changing forms of everyday human life through water samples gathered by strangers across the world. These contributors, whom he calls floaters, become his co-authors: some send samples directly, while others leave them anonymously in parks, alleyways, abandoned buildings, or on busy streets for the artist to discover. Nearly every sample arrives with a letter, opening a dialogue shaped by place, mood, memory, and time. Some are poetic — seasonal rain, glacial melt, water collected with great care — while others carry a more volatile charge: specimens from conflict zones and distressed landscapes, offerings shaped by fetish desire, or liquids disturbed by contamination, acid, or traces of blood. Rebus has assembled a vast library of waters from rains, rivers, seas, oceans, and glaciers, each preserved as both material record and human message. He freezes these samples with watercolor pigments, lets them melt onto varied paper surfaces, and then enters the resulting abstract fields with figurative imagery, turning each work into a bridge between distant lives, material transformation, and the fragile poetics of connection.
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Dima Rebus (1988) was born in a small town in Russia and graduated from the Moscow Art and Industry Institute in 2011. His illustrations, watercolors, and street-art have been exhibited in Moscow, Belgium, Argentina, and Saint Petersburg. He works on a wide array of projects ranging from his personal catalog of works to illustrations for magazines and various publishing houses including Clever, National Geographic, Esquire, GQ, and Bang-Bang. He currently lives and works in New York.
