Tom Palin - Adjacent to

Exhibition Dates & Opening Hours:

4th of April - 19th of April

Thursday - Sunday, 14:00 - 18:00

The Transformation Gallery is pleased to present 'Adjacent to', an exhibition by UK-based artist Tom Palin, running from Friday 4th April to Friday 19th April 2025. This collection showcases Palin’s distinctive approach to painting, where materiality, surface, and structure intertwine to create works that are as much about their physical presence as they are about pictorial content.

Private View:Join us for the opening on Thursday 3rd April from 18:00 to 21:00 at The Transformation Gallery

Exhibition Dates & Opening Hours:4th April - 19th AprilThursday - Sunday, 14:00 - 18:00

Press Release​​​​​

Tom Palin is known for his small-scale oil paintings, which often juxtapose and invert wooden panels, foregrounding interrelationships of form, material, and narrative. His works explore notions of partiality, completeness, and repetition, using layered surfaces to engage with ideas of disclosure and concealment. His practice is deeply engaged with the act of painting itself, embracing both the physicality of the medium and the interpretive possibilities it offers.

A key aspect of Palin’s work is the phenomenon of pareidolia—our tendency to perceive familiar forms in abstract patterns—which, combined with his rich painterly textures, encourages shifting perceptions and multiple readings. By working within the tension between surface and depth, visibility and obscurity, Palin’s paintings challenge conventional notions of image-making and invite the viewer into a complex dialogue between what is seen and what is implied.

Palin has exhibited widely in the UK and internationally, with recent group exhibitions including Atemkristall, Blyth Gallery, Imperial College London (2025), Friends of the Galleries and I Regret to Inform You That, both at The Transformation Gallery (2024). His work has also been showcased in Post-Truth, Fiction, Object at CRAMA, Berlin (2022), and included in Showcase at Dean Clough Galleries (2021). He has been longlisted for The Contemporary British Painting Prize (2021, 2018) and was shortlisted for The Lynn Painter-Stainers Prize (2016) and The Marmite Prize for Painting (2013). His accolades include the British Institution Award at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition (2015), The Gilchrist-Fisher Award (2004), and The Hunting Young Artist of the Year Award (2000).

Beyond his painting practice, Palin’s academic and written work explores the philosophy of painting, particularly in relation to modernist legacies, abstraction, the role of surface, and notions of medium specificity. His engagement with Romanticism, landscape painting traditions, and phenomenology informs the way his paintings are experienced—situating them not just as objects of visual appreciation but as material and temporal encounters. Currently, Palin is employed as a Senior Tutor in Painting at the Royal College of Art.