Nothing on view. The current piece won't be shown until it's finished.
An interview covering practice, process, and the move to Colorado — the full story in Adam's own words.
Read interview →A three-exhibition review covering the Blo Back Gallery summer show. The critic compares the work to late-90s Juxtapoz — semi-psychedelic paintings on wood, skateboards, and traditional canvas, plentiful and ranging in size and format.
Read review →The practice itself is the work. A year-long commitment made every January. Painted every day, each day documented. The daily practice is not separate from the larger work — it is where the language develops, where risk is taken without consequence, where the hand stays honest.
Frames are found first — thrift stores, estate sales, architectural salvage. The frame determines the surface, which determines the format, which shapes the thinking. Found objects and embedded hardware accumulate alongside research: mythology, systems theory, ancient philosophy, contemporary collapse.
Motifs recur across pieces — the crown, the skull, the pyramid, the evergreen, the eye. A shared language that migrates through the body of work, accumulating meaning through repetition.
By choice. Several pieces have been deliberately destroyed. The act of unmaking is part of the instruction. Not loss — design. — burned, sledgehammered, thrown with paint mid-show. This is not performance for its own sake.
It is an argument: that the object is not the final form. That creation and destruction are the same cycle at different speeds. That what survives — a token, a photograph, a memory in a room — carries the full weight of everything that preceded it.
Build Destroy Repeat — mixed media on cardboard, assembled and set on fire. The token is the only surviving form. BUILT2DESTROY — taken to with a sledgehammer. These are not accidents. The destruction was the point from the beginning.
Mixed media painter · 15 years practice
Adam Toksöz is a mixed media painter working from a studio in Cotopaxi, Colorado — a small mountain town in the San Luis Valley he has called home for seven years. The shift in his work came more gradually: a few years in, the burnout from what he'd been making started showing up in the paintings. He let it. The work changed.
His practice begins with frames. Found at thrift stores, estate sales, and architectural salvage — ornate gold, barn board, painted white, octagonal — each frame determines the surface, which shapes the thinking. What fills them is layered: acrylic, chalk, charcoal, conté crayon, gold and silver leaf, spray paint, alongside embedded objects — vintage postcards, coins, circuit boards, matchbooks, found hardware, incense.
The symbolic vocabulary draws from ancient mythology, world religions, systems theory, and contemporary cultural collapse. Nothing is invented — the crown, the skull, the pyramid, the eye, the evergreen — these motifs migrate through the body of work as a shared language. An Egyptian feather-weighing informs a composition about grief. A Windows error dialog becomes a theological statement. The ancient and the digital collapse into each other because they always were the same thing.
The mountains have a way of making the work more honest. You stop performing for an audience that isn't there.
Rooted in street art, Toksöz has maintained a daily painting practice across four year-long projects — each started on his birthday in January — with three completed and the fourth currently underway. In 2024 he presented Transmissions from the Ancient Past, a solo exhibition of 30 mixed media paintings at Blo Back Gallery in Pueblo, Colorado. Three works remain in the permanent collection.
Don't hesitate to reach out. Signal is open. Transmissions were never meant to be one-way.
Acquisition, commissions, press, collaboration, studio visits. Cotopaxi, Colorado.
I was working in a restaurant. This was before the mountains, before the daily projects, before any of this. I was drawing on everything — receipts, napkins, whatever was within reach during a slow shift.
The guest checks were the best surface. They had weight to them. The carbon paper underneath gave the lines a particular quality. I was filling them with whatever was in my head — skulls, faces, creatures, the same symbols I'm still drawing now, honestly.
I kept the best ones. My wife Maggie — we met at that restaurant — convinced me to hold onto them. She'd seen me throw too much away. So they went in a folder, then a box, then moved with us, then moved again.
In 2021 I minted them. First collection. 50 pieces, one Ethereum. I didn't know what I was doing exactly — nobody did — but it felt right to put those drawings somewhere permanent. Something that had been on paper for a decade deserved to live somewhere that couldn't burn down.
Maggie still has the originals somewhere.
