Tom Varley (b. 1985) is an artist living and working in Glasgow, Scotland. Since 2020 Tom has concentrated exclusively on painting and drawing. Prior to this he worked with a range of media including film, video, text, and installation. His artworks have often explored the subjective character of individual experience and how this relates to wider systems and structures — language, ideology, and economy.
Tom Varley (b. 1985) is an artist living and working in Glasgow, Scotland. Since 2020 Tom has concentrated exclusively on painting and drawing. Prior to this he worked with a range of media including film, video, text, and installation. His artworks have often explored the subjective character of individual experience and how this relates to wider systems and structures — language, ideology, and economy.
Tom Varley
Gravediggers / New work
Glasgow Project Room
7th – 16th February 2025
Preview 6th February 6-8pm
Gravediggers is a new series of charcoal drawings of oil rigs. Or to be more accurate, of one particular oil rig visible from where I currently live overlooking the Firth of Forth – a spectral presence, looming on the horizon. (Almost) all the pictures in this exhibition are malfunctioning landscapes: landscape with subsurface accumulation of hydrocarbons; landscape in light of extractive capitalism; landscape in spite of geometric abstraction.
Tom Varley (b. 1985) is an artist living and working in Scotland. Since March 2020, Tom has concentrated exclusively on painting and drawing. Prior to this he worked with a range of media including film, video, text, and installation. His artworks have often explored the subjective character of individual experience and how this relates to wider systems and structures (language, ideology, economy, etc.) His works are often playful, and deploy a distinctive visual language characterised by flat colour, close-up composition, and recurring motifs of hands, screens, circles and ellipses.
Tom graduated from Glasgow School of Art in 2008 and completed an MFA at Goldsmiths in 2017. He served on the Transmission committee between 2010 and 2012, took part in the Collective Gallery's New Work Scotland programme in 2013, and was an associate artist at Wysing Arts Centre in 2015. Tom was the recipient of the Drawing Room Bursary Award in 2012, a Goldsmiths Postgraduate Scholarship in 2015, and the Chelsea Arts Club Trust Award in 2016. His work has been shown in group exhibitions and screenings at venues including: Centre for Contemporary Art Glasgow; DIY Space for London; Whitechapel Art Gallery; Cooper Gallery Dundee; PS2 Belfast; Shanghai Minsheng Art Museum; Ciné 13 Théâtre Paris; MUPO Oaxaca; Global Committee New York; Volksbuehne Pavilion Berlin; ICA London; Rhubaba Edinburgh; and the Drawing Room London. Tom has had solo exhibitions at Tramway Glasgow, Collective Gallery Edinburgh, and Glasgow Project Room.