Dawes Gray

Dawes Gray probably spent more time in the print shop than the classroom—his 2011 screenprint Caravaggio isn’t a copy, it’s a riff, swapping Baroque chiaroscuro for gritty halftone dots. The trick is the shadows: what should be black bleeds into the paper like ink left too long in a tray, turning every plate into a shadow self-portrait of the artist himself. If you’ve ever held a cheap poster that somehow feels older than the original, you’ve met his work. Look for the dot pattern in Caravaggio and you’ll spot it in every other print he ever pulled.