Adam Dix

Eye of the Huntress is proud to bring you the latest work of British artist Adam Dix, hailed as one of the 100 Painters of Tomorrow in the acclaimed book published by Thames & Hudson.

Adam Dix’s work depicts our collective relationship with technology, communication and ritual. He is one of the few relevant painters today shining a light on our obsession with technology and the ominous dangers it presents and in a manner that creeps into the  viewer’s mind sub-consciously and begs to question what we are looking at. In certain paintings, the ritualistic group settings remind us of a fishbowl scenario, that confronts our sleepwalking into something mysteriously prophetic and absurd. At other times, Dix’s almost quixotic obsession with these archaic satellite dishes, or radio towers become modern day monumental sculptures, gloriously transmuted into objects of mindless worship and entertainment.

Ironically, as technology and social media binds us together we have never felt more isolated. Influenced by E.M Forster’s The Machine Stops, people old and young, are gathered in hive-like groupings through our devices to try and bridge the new socially distant void and loneliness in a vast world.  We hide behind technology, editing what we want others to believe, blurring the lines between what is fake and what is real. Adam often uses geometric pixelation as seen to denote a blurriness, to describe a dysfunction or breakdown of man’s communication.  Rather than a dark pessimism, Dix’s paintings exude a sense of enthusiasm “brimming with enthusiasm” mood, a naïveté that despite all odds, tickles the heart and invites us to add our own associations to the work.

Dix grew up with a father who was a painter and jazz musician and a mother who worked in TV.  This combination meant he was exposed to both creative and technological stimuli from a young age and became fascinated with the choreographed language that old and new technology presented, and how we as a society were interacting with it.  Dix questions man’s conceited belief that we are controlling technology, when the truth may be that it is controlling us.?

The science fiction comics of Judge Dredd and films like Blade Runner, Fahrenheit 451 provided a lexicon that has broadened in Dix’s work over the last 10 years. His work can have a rather cinematic feel in that they often look  like captured scenes or film sets. His painterly process is long and laborious, with layers and glazes of oil paint added to build up his soft, hazy images as if seen through a blurred lens.

In his latest paintings Dix takes his complex narratives to a more reductive style, as seen in “Clack”, distilling his imagery down into just plains and facets of early primitive paintings. The choice of palette or dress is intentionally chosen - some that harken to references of the 50’s or even older more medieval figures, and yet there is a timeless quality to Dix’s paintings as he masterfully weaves between past and future narratives.