FRED TOMASELLI (b. 1956, Santa Monica, CA) lives and works in New York.
Fred Tomaselli makes exquisitely rendered paintings on wood panels, combining an array of unorthodox materials suspended in a thick layer of clear, epoxy resin. Medicinal herbs, prescription pills and hallucinogenic plants are combined with images cut from books and magazines: flowers, birds, butterflies, arms, legs and noses. Tomaselli sees his paintings and their compendium of data as windows into a surreal, hallucinatory universe. Tomaselli grew up in Southern California, where what he has described as “artificial, immersive, theme park reality” was a normal part of everyday life and the idea of a “contaminated” image – one that is Post-modern in its borrowing from both high and low culture – permeates his work.
Tomaselli has been included in numerous group exhibitions including Open Ends at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2000); the Berlin Biennale (2001); the Liverpool Biennial (2002); the Whitney Biennial (2004); SITE Santa Fe (2004); and Ecstasy, at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, CA (2006). He has had solo exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1999); the Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art, FL (2001); SITE Santa Fe (2001); the Albright-Knox Gallery of Art, Buffalo, NY (2003); Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, Scotland (2004); IMMA, Dublin (2005); and The Rose Art Museum, Boston (2005).
Tomaselli is represented by James Cohan Gallery in New York, and White Cube in London
s