BIO

Adam Cooley is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans painting, sculpture, film, fashion, interior design, and performance art. His work deploys fantastic imagery and symbolic motifs to evoke abstract, esoteric, and transformational narratives. Through richly textured surfaces and processes of oxidation, aging, and patination, Cooley treats his works as evolving objects, allowing change, wear, and decay to become integral to their expressive force.

Throughout his career, Cooley has explored themes of transformation, time, numbers, spiritual metamorphosis, and the liminal boundary between creation and destruction. His visual world is inhabited by hybrid creatures, symbolic emblems, and layered numeric systems that serve as conduits for his inquiry into inner alchemy, the unknown, and the spiritual subtext beneath the visible world. In some exhibitions, he has invited viewers to interact tangibly with works, allowing touch, abrasion, or manipulation, to further the idea that art is a living, mutable system rather than a fixed object.

Born in Rochester, New York, Cooley works between New York, Osaka, and Durham, North Carolina. His work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, Gallery Maronie in Kyoto, Daimaru Department Store in Kyoto, Gallery Nao in Tokyo, Hankyu Department Store in Osaka, the Oxford International Art Fair, and CEPA Gallery in Buffalo. In 2016, he published Adam Cooley: Reflections in the Light of Darkness, a monograph surveying 20 years of creative output. Recent exhibitions include LOVE × 愛 at Daimaru Art Gallery in Kyoto (2022), Buffalo Dreaming at the Buffalo History Museum (2022), Boro Land at CEPA Gallery (2022), and Think Outside the Box, an interactive public sculpture commissioned by the Town of Chapel Hill (2024). His work is held in private collections globally and has been featured in magazines, documentaries, and art books.