Born in 1971, the artist grew up in Türkiye and studied at the Fine Arts Academy of Dokuz Eylül University between 1990 and 1995. His graduation thesis focused on the Everyman Morality Play tradition, one of the foundational narrative forms of medieval religious theatre. During this early period, Rhys developed a sustained interest in conceptual frameworks addressing humanity’s position in relation to sin, death, and moral reckoning. In the Everyman tradition, the individual is not presented as an exceptional hero, but as an anonymous figure standing in for everyone. Rather than foregrounding personal psychology, the narrative establishes a universal stage of conscience, inviting the viewer not to empathise, but to bear witness. This approach forms an early intellectual foundation for the ethical distance Rhys maintains in his current painting practice, where the viewer is positioned not as a spectator, but as a witness.

In the years following his academic training, Rhys worked in Istanbul across a range of fields including film art direction, textile design, graphic design, and culinary practice. Throughout this period, he explored form not merely as an aesthetic outcome, but as a structure capable of producing meaning, order, and hierarchy across different media. Through the artisan porcelain brand he founded, he investigated the relationship between object, use, and ritual, while further developing his sensitivity to the connections between stage, body, and surface within an interdisciplinary context.

This multilayered production history does not translate, in Rhys’s current painting practice, into a pursuit of aesthetically “resolved” forms. Instead, it manifests as a deliberate impulse to disrupt and reconstruct the body. Anatomical structures are fragmented, distorted, and detached from classical regimes of representation. This deformation, however, is not an act of destruction; rather, it constitutes the construction of a new anatomy. By rebuilding the body, Rhys creates a field in which opposing concepts such as sin and atonement, pain and pleasure, can collide on the same surface.

The figure ceases to function as a narrative-bearing character; it becomes anonymous, reduced, and condensed into a universal condition. Themes of sin, death, and reckoning first examined through the Everyman tradition re-emerge today as a silent, timeless, and stage-less space of confrontation articulated through the body. The viewer is not emotionally guided, nor offered explanation. The body remains, in all its weight, demanding witness.