Fred Tomaselli

Fred Tomaselli (born in Santa Monica, California, in 1956) is an American artist. He is best known for his highly detailed paintings on wood panels, combining an array of unorthodox materials suspended in a thick layer of clear, epoxy resin.

Fred Tomaselli
Fred Tomaselli in his Brooklyn studio, 2006
Born1956 (1956)
Santa Monica, California
NationalityAmerican
EducationCalifornia State University, Fullerton
Known forPainting

The Art of Tomaselli

Tomaselli's paintings include medicinal herbs, prescription pills and hallucinogenic plants alongside images cut from books and magazines: flowers, birds, butterflies, arms, legs and noses, which are combined into patterns that spread over the surface of the painting like a virus or growth. He uses an explosion of color and combines it with a basis in art history. His style usually involves collage, painting, and/or glazing. He seals the collages in resin after gluing them down and going over them with different varnishes.[1]

I want people to get lost in the work. I want to seduce people into it and I want people to escape inside the world of the work. In that way the work is pre-Modernist. I throw all of my obsessions and loves into the work, and I try not to be too embarrassed about any of it. I love nature, I love gardening, I love watching birds, and all of that gets into the work. I just try to be true to who I am and make the work I want to see. I don’t have a radical agenda.[1]

Tomaselli sees his paintings and their compendium of data as windows into a surreal, hallucinatory universe. “It is my ultimate aim”, he says, “to seduce and transport the viewer in to space of these pictures while simultaneously revealing the mechanics of that seduction.” Tomaselli has also incorporated allegorical figures into his work – in Untitled (Expulsion) (2000), for example, he borrows the Adam and Eve figures from Masaccio's Expulsion from the Garden of Eden (1426–27), and in Field Guides (2003) he creates his own version of the grim reaper. His figures are described anatomically so that their organs and veins are exposed in the manner of a scientific drawing. He writes that his “inquiry into utopia/dystopia – framed by artifice but motivated by the desire for the real – has turned out to be the primary subject of my work”.[2]

Album covers

Tomaselli's artwork has been on the front cover of several albums. He designed the front cover artwork for Laura Cantrell's third album 'Humming by the Flowered Vine' on Matador Records. His painting, 'Gravity In Four Directions', was also used as partial cover artwork for The Magnetic Fields' album "i". He also has artwork featured in The Wilco Book, a book made by the band Wilco. His artwork is portrayed on Phish's eleventh studio album, "Joy", which was released September 8, 2009. His art also appears on the CD by Elysian Fields "Dreams That Breathe Your Name" released in July 2004.

Selected solo exhibitions

References
  1. Robert Ayers (October 20, 2006), Fred Tomaselli, ARTINFO, retrieved 2008-04-21
  2. http://www.whitecube.com/artists/fred_tomaselli/ Fred Tomaselli at White Cube gallery, London
  3. Goldner, Liz (March 2015). "Fred Tomaselli". Orange Coast: 34.
  4. "Fred Tomaselli: The Times | University of Michigan Museum of Art". umma.umich.edu. Retrieved 2020-03-11.
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