Monica Adams
Monica Adams (b. 1971) is a Melbourne based artist with a painting practice spanning more than three decades. She trained at Monash University, completing a Bachelor of Fine Art in 1995 and Honours the following year, and held her first solo show, Inner Picture, at Kirkcaldy Davies Gallery (Malvern, 1997).
Adams paints idealised, timeless women, drawing on classic beauty icons of the 1940s and 50s, rendered in long hair and painted lips and layered with bold, colourful patterns, borrowing from the traditional Indonesian technique of hand drawn batik patterning. Across her practice, she stretches her own canvases and works with clear gesso as a ground, painting pattern and colour first before drawing figures in charcoal, then finishes with layered oil washes that lend the work its distinctive soft, veiled quality. Her practice explores womanhood and femininity, and each work holds three qualities Adams returns to across the series: beauty, in the figure herself and in the handling of the paint; veiling, the layers that conceal as much as they reveal of who she is; and fracture, rendered through gold leaf, pattern and texture, a sense of a woman coming together, searching to become fully herself. Pattern itself extends beyond the figurative work into large scale abstract paintings, layered pieces with a sense of antiquity, drawing on the forms of old buildings sourced from a wide range of places, hand drawn or, at times, printed. Her practice draws on a wide range of influences, from Impressionism and Monet's texture and patterning, encountered firsthand in Paris, to Jenny Saville's figures and the pattern work of Basquiat and street art, alongside a period spent studying and working across the UK, France, Austria, Italy, Switzerland and Egypt in 2000.
Adams has exhibited continuously since 1997, including solo shows at Jackman Gallery (St Kilda, 1999–2000), a long-running presence at Manyung Gallery (Sorrento, 2015) and Nexus Gallery (2009–2017), a group show at Agora Gallery, (New York, 2018), a solo show at Bomb Factory, (London, 2024), and most recently Gallery Azur, Paris and Berlin (2025). In 1996 she co-founded Indigo Studios, a private art school in Melbourne, where she taught painting and life drawing for several years, and she has since founded her own Sorrento based gallery space, both a gallery and working studio. Her work is held in the Monash University Collection, the Caulfield Grammar Collection, and private collections across Australia, the UK, Singapore, France and the United States.
Monica Adams (b. 1971) is a Melbourne based artist with a painting practice spanning more than three decades. She trained at Monash University, completing a Bachelor of Fine Art in 1995 and Honours the following year, and held her first solo show, Inner Picture, at Kirkcaldy Davies Gallery (Malvern, 1997).
Adams paints idealised, timeless women, drawing on classic beauty icons of the 1940s and 50s, rendered in long hair and painted lips and layered with bold, colourful patterns, borrowing from the traditional Indonesian technique of hand drawn batik patterning. Across her practice, she stretches her own canvases and works with clear gesso as a ground, painting pattern and colour first before drawing figures in charcoal, then finishes with layered oil washes that lend the work its distinctive soft, veiled quality. Her practice explores womanhood and femininity, and each work holds three qualities Adams returns to across the series: beauty, in the figure herself and in the handling of the paint; veiling, the layers that conceal as much as they reveal of who she is; and fracture, rendered through gold leaf, pattern and texture, a sense of a woman coming together, searching to become fully herself. Pattern itself extends beyond the figurative work into large scale abstract paintings, layered pieces with a sense of antiquity, drawing on the forms of old buildings sourced from a wide range of places, hand drawn or, at times, printed. Her practice draws on a wide range of influences, from Impressionism and Monet's texture and patterning, encountered firsthand in Paris, to Jenny Saville's figures and the pattern work of Basquiat and street art, alongside a period spent studying and working across the UK, France, Austria, Italy, Switzerland and Egypt in 2000.
Adams has exhibited continuously since 1997, including solo shows at Jackman Gallery (St Kilda, 1999–2000), a long-running presence at Manyung Gallery (Sorrento, 2015) and Nexus Gallery (2009–2017), a group show at Agora Gallery, (New York, 2018), a solo show at Bomb Factory, (London, 2024), and most recently Gallery Azur, Paris and Berlin (2025). In 1996 she co-founded Indigo Studios, a private art school in Melbourne, where she taught painting and life drawing for several years, and she has since founded her own Sorrento based gallery space, both a gallery and working studio. Her work is held in the Monash University Collection, the Caulfield Grammar Collection, and private collections across Australia, the UK, Singapore, France and the United States.