Up close, his works appear as abstract arrays of points and colour fields; yet from a distance they resolve into recognisable scenes.
Tom Adair is a self-taught contemporary artist based in Melbourne, recognised for his distinctive fusion of airbrushing, photography, street-art sensibility and industrial materials. Beginning his creative life within Melbourne’s graffiti community, he later worked across interior design, furniture and fashion, all of which inform the precision, surface awareness and architectural focus evident in his current practice. His work frequently reinterprets photographic imagery, transforming suburban homes, landscapes and contemporary cultural motifs into hand-rendered pieces that play with perception and distance.
A hallmark of Adair’s practice is his use of halftone and CMYK-style dot systems, painstakingly recreated by hand using airbrush techniques. Up close, his works appear as abstract arrays of points and colour fields; yet from a distance they resolve into recognisable scenes. This tension between surface and image allows him to examine ideas surrounding representation, idealisation and the glossy veneer of modern life. He often incorporates materials such as aluminium panels, neon lighting and CNC-cut foam, extending his work into sculptural and architectural dimensions.
Across his exhibitions—including his debut solo show HOME and later bodies of work such as Chromatones and /Imagine (Cowboys)—Adair explores how media, memory and technology shape what we see and how we interpret it. Themes of suburban aspiration, the blur between natural and built environments, and the shifting role of digital imagery are central to his recent pieces, some of which begin with AI-generated references that he then translates by hand. This process underscores his ongoing interest in authorship, craft and the human presence within an increasingly digital visual landscape.