Fred Tomaselli
Robert E. Blum Gallery, 1st floor
Art Exhibition previously on at Brooklyn Museum of Art in United States. Published by Brooklyn Museum on Monday 03 May 2010. Friday 08 October 2010 to Sunday 02 January 2011.
This mid-career survey presents a selection of Fred Tomaselli’s artwork from the late 1980s to the present including the unique epoxy resin paintings for which he is best known. These layered paintings combine imagery of plants and birds (clipped from books) with prescription pills and hallucinogenic plants to create complex, highly stylized compositions.
Tomaselli’s artwork draws upon a wide range of sources from both popular culture and art history, and from his own hobbies of bird watching and botany. Growing up near the desert in southern California, Tomaselli was influenced by the manufactured unreality of theme parks and the music and drug counterculture of Los Angles in the 1970s and 1980s.
His distinctive melding of these influences coalesces into a personal, folk-driven, utopian vision of the American West. One of the pioneering artists who moved to Williamsburg, Brooklyn in the 1980s, Tomaselli continues to live and work in the borough.
Organization: This exhibition is organized and toured by the Aspen Art Museum and The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College. The Brooklyn Museum presentation is coordinated by Eugenie Tsai, John and Barbara Vogelstein Curator of Contemporary Art, Brooklyn Museum.
Publication: A catalogue accompanies this exhibition.
Tour: Aspen Art Museum, August 1–October 11, 2009; The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art
Gallery at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York, February 6–June 6, 2010.
See also Video Interview with Fred Tomaselli
