Tom Adair is an Australian contemporary artist whose practice examines the visual language of contemporary life. Drawing on a diverse vocabulary of imagery, he reimagines familiar landscapes, everyday objects and text, inviting us to reconsider the world around us. Moving between popular culture and art history, Adair brings the aesthetics of digital technology and mass communication into dialogue with the natural environment. Vivid and visually compelling, his work reflects the experience of living in a screen-saturated age, exploring the intersections of image-making, identity and the environment.

In his 2022 painting ‘Pool Side Cool’, Adair depicts a backyard swimming pool framed by palm trees, transforming a familiar leisure scene into a bold, stylised composition. The work evokes the modernist sensibilities of Howard Arkley and David Hockney, while asserting Adair’s own distinctive visual language.

Executed using a painstaking, hand-applied airbrush technique, the painting reinterprets the aesthetics of industrial offset printing. Its striking surface plays with the tension between mechanical precision and the irregularities of human touch. Viewed up close, subtle accumulations of pigment and variations in air pressure emerge as delicate, abstract layers; from a distance, these imperfections recede, creating the illusion of a mechanically reproduced image.

Adair has exhibited extensively across Australia in solo and group exhibitions, and has been selected as a finalist in several significant art prizes, including the Fisher’s Ghost Art Award on four occasions since 2019. For collectors drawn to contemporary painting that combines vivid colour, technical precision and a fresh perspective on familiar subjects, Pool Side Cool makes an immediate impression.

Tom ADAIR (1983 - )
'Pool Side Cool' 2022
Airbrush polymer paint on canvas
Image Size: 175 x 130 cm
Dimensions: 178 x 132 x 5 cm
Signed: Signed, titled and dated verso.
Comes with Letter of Provenance
Condition:Excellent:
(c) The Artist or Assignee