About the artist

Tom Adair is an Australian contemporary artist whose practice remarks on contemporary life. Through a panoply of imagery, Adair deconstructs familiar landscapes, objects, and text to renew our perception of our surrounds. His works interact with both cultural clichés and the canon, often founded on an understated reverence for popular technology, which Adair pairs unexpectedly with nature. The brightness of his work reflects an observer of the virtual age with a lively inquiry for the interplay between screens, publishing, selfhood and the environment. 

Adair’s CMYK paintings are instantly recognizable. He reinvents the aesthetics of industrial offset printing by hand through a unique, manually-intensive airbrush technique, achieving a highly conscious stylistic consistency. Often made at large-scale, these CMYK works camouflage themselves when viewed intimately, with the organic residue of air pressure accruing in abstract layers. At a distance, these personal imperfections evaporate; the CMYK paintings appear machine-made, a formal illusion accomplishing grand effects. Adair’s paintings also explore the interplay of focus made famous by Renaissance sfumato, again, repurposed for airbrush. At times, Adair interweaves elements of set design and lighting into his paintings and installations, opting for commercial and industrial materials, such as DIBOND aluminium, neon, and HDP foam.

Adair is a self-taught artist with a background in interior design, furniture and fashion. He is also the founder-curator of artist-run space Thought Forms, hosting emerging and established artists, based in Richmond, Melbourne.

- Mark Chu