Skip to content

Fred Tomaselli

Fred Tomaselli Video Feature. Film by Greg Poole. Produced by James Cohan, 2020. 

Biography

Fred Tomaselli - Artists - James Cohan
Photo by Genevieve Garruppo. 

 

For over forty years, Fred Tomaselli has invoked the power of nature through deftly constructed maximalist paintings and works on paper. Celebrated for his singular approach, Tomaselli’s painting practice fuses organic matter, photographic reproductions, and dense ornamentation into surfaces that seem to pulse with their own internal light. His work has always moved between registers: the microscopic and the cosmic, the botanical and the geometric, the careful study of the shape of nature and the vertigo of deep space. In 2024, in the catalogue published on the occasion of his solo exhibition, Fred Tomaselli: Second Nature, art historian and curator Rochelle Steiner writes: “[Tomaselli] assembles his works out of various bits and parts of the world at large, which he seeks out and which come to him serendipitously. He explores topics even, and especially, when they seem obsolete or uneasy—all while chronicling life with an incisive eye. He has depicted, with great artistry and craft, the consequences of what is perhaps humanity’s greatest folly—our insistence that we somehow stand apart from nature, rather than understand our integral place in its continuum and regeneration.”

 

 

Tomaselli's resin paintings of the natural world combine collaged elements of flora and fauna sealed beneath glossy layers, building environments of kaleidoscopic detail that prompt both careful observation and deliberate invention. Flowers, leaves, ferns, and vines are assembled from cutout photographic sources—scanned, printed, and precisely arranged on wood panel—so that what reads at a distance as lush botanical abundance reveals itself, up close, as the product of extraordinary accumulated labor. While some forms are naturalistic and whole, others unravel at their edges into geometric, patterned structures. The result is an imaginary space that cannot exist in nature but insists on its own internal logic, collapsing distinctions of time, season, and location into a single, awe-inspiring field.

 

 

Since 2005, Tomaselli has taken the front page of the New York Times as raw material, altering headlines and reimagining photographs with gouache and collage to create surreal compositions that hold the full spectrum of the news cycle up to scrutiny, from regional anecdotes to global crises. By reconfiguring images, headlines, and captions, he presents his own version of the newspaper—one that treats the front page not as a record of events but as a site of ongoing editorial mediation. As Tomaselli has stated, “I think that maybe the Times collages are quietly political, in that I can riff on anything I want, while the horrors of the world become the background buzz. Maybe I’m saying that the world may be going to hell, but I still keep painting.”

 

 

Fred Tomaselli (born 1956, Santa Monica, CA) has been the subject of solo exhibitions at institutions including the Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach, CA (2024); Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, NE (2019); Oceanside Museum of Art, Oceanside, CA (2018); Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, OH (2016);  Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (2014); University of Michigan Museum of Art that traveled to the Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA (2014); a survey exhibition at Aspen Art Museum (2009) that toured to the Tang Teaching Museum & Art Gallery in Saratoga Springs, NY and the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY (2010); The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, UK (2004), that toured to four venues in Europe and the US; Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Buffalo, NY (2003); SITE Santa Fe, Santa Fe, NM (2001); Palm Beach ICA, Lake Worth, FL (2001), and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY (1999). His works have been included in international biennial exhibitions including the Biennale of Sydney (2010); Prospect.1 New Orleans (2008); SITE Santa Fe (2004); and the Whitney Biennial (2004), among others. Tomaselli’s work can be found in the public collections of institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Buffalo, NY; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.; Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL; San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, CA; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; Orange County Museum of Art, Santa Ana, CA; and many others.

 

Download Fred Tomaselli CV

BiographyOLD

Drawing upon art historical sources and Eastern and Western decorative traditions, Fred Tomaselli's works explode in mesmerizing patterns that appear to grow organically across his compositions.  Curator James Rondeau writes: “Over the course of the last ten years, Fred Tomaselli has established an international reputation for his meticulously crafted, richly detailed, deliriously beautiful works of both abstract and figurative art... Forms implode, explode, oscillate, buzz, loop, swirl, and spiral.  Actual objects, photographic representations, and painted surfaces co-exist without hierarchy on and in a single picture plane.  The combined effect, neither determinably real nor fully illusionistic, is at once electrifying and destabilizing.”

View More

 

Back To Top