Tom was born and raised in an artistic family in Switzerland. His father, a child to a single mother, came from a war-torn Germany as a little boy and settled in Zurich. His mother of a Swiss and Italian background, is an artist herself. Seeing his mother struggle as an artist all her life, Tom decided to use his creative talents in a commercial way and became a fashion, advertising and portrait photographer. However, the commerciality of his job was always in conflict to Tom’s artistic side from the beginning and made it difficult for him to stay true to himself in his work. It took a long time for him to identify as an artist and to dare to give his art the space it needed. In 2017 he finally felt free to call himself an artist, while living in the mountains of the Engadin valley in Switzerland after many years in London and Paris.
Tom named himself after a local mountain called Piz Nair and created the series “Luftschlösser” (Air Castles) and “Diavolezza”. He is fascinated how mountains can be suspended in clouds and take on different meanings by slightly turning or manipulating them digitally. In another series called “concrete chaos” he reflects on a concrete building called Goetheanum by Rudolf Steiner who’s own modernist architectural style is strongly influenced by the organic forms of nature. These three series have been shown in 2018 in at exhibitions at the Saratz Hotel in Pontresina, Plutschow Gallery in Zurich and the BOON Galerie in Paris 2022 where some of the works have found a place in renowned private art collections.
Currently Tom works on an ongoing series called “Metamorphic Images”, large digital images from numerous photographs that have been taken in art session during a certain amount of time. They are assembled in the style of a collage and morphed together. He calls this photo-painting as the prolonged view of a subject lets him capture a span of time and not just the moment of the exposure. It’s a bit like a painter does, when looking at and creating his work, he explains. This series looks mostly at art historical references from mythological stories and its interpretations in art history. Part of the Series were shown at the UNORT art lab in Zürich in 2023.
