Fred Tomaselli

James Cohan Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new paintings and drawings by New York-based painter Fred Tomaselli.

Tomaselli is best known for his paintings that incorporate acrylic, photo-collage, pills, hallucinogenic plants and medicinal herbs in abstract compositions or fictive landscapes. Since the early 1980s his work has referenced drug and psychedelic sub-cultures while exploring themes of utopianism. In this exhibition Tomaselli further explores his interest in utopian ideals, but is also equally concerned with its corresponding failures and dystopias.

Throughout his career Fred Tomaselli has been interested in the concept of mapping – the notion of finding one's place in the world, whether it is via echo-soundings or charting a suburban planned community. The confluence of the natural world with the imposition or discord of the human drive for order poses a continual theme. Tomaselli's visual cartography consists of an overlay of the organic and the artificial. His recent imagery has come to include insects, tiny photocopies of songbirds, leaves from his garden, pieces of maps, and cutouts from outwear catalogues, as he continues to expand on his hybrid esthetic.

Fred Tomaselli was born in Santa Monica, California in 1956. Since the late 1980s he has had innumerable solo and group exhibitions in museums and galleries throughout the world. exhibitions projects include exhibitions at White Cube, London in May 2001, the Cuenca Biennial, Ecuador in December 2001 and the Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art, Florida in December 2001. Fred Tomaselli lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.