Fred Tomaselli: Gallery Exhibition at 48 Walker St

23 October - 21 November 2020

  • Since the early 1990’s, Fred Tomaselli has created multimedia paintings which explode in mesmerizing and hallucinatory patterns. Their various components—organic matter from his garden, collaged elements from printed sources, and hand-painted fauna and ornament—are all suspended in layers of clear, polished resin. There is always a suggestion of transformation in the materials encapsulated in resin, creating a tension between the dynamism of the image and the stasis of its medium. 

     

    The new paintings on view in this exhibition represent the first major body of work to marry Tomaselli’s resin paintings with his ongoing New York Times collages. Tomaselli’s interest in newsprint as material has become an extended exploration into the power of news media to shape and reshape our perceptions of reality. Conceptually, these fragments of media are similar to the psychoactive and psychedelic drugs he terms “reality modification devices,” which were prevalent in his work throughout the 1990’s and noticeably absent from this recent work. Tomaselli has traded one sort of buzz for another, replacing pills with text and headlines pulled directly from The New York Times.

     

  •  

  • PAINTINGS

  • Tomaselli’s interest in newsprint as material has become an extended exploration into the power of news media to shape and...

    Tomaselli’s interest in newsprint as material has become an extended exploration into the power of news media to shape and reshape our perceptions of reality. 

     

    In this painting, the artist's newest abstraction, Tomaselli lets real life find a way into the picture. Here, we see flames lapping at the lower edge of the spiraling composition, a reference to the wildfires that continue to ravage regions across the globe.

     

  • "I found my way back into making these resin works where I incorporate text ... It’s the buzz of the outer world intruding on this world of beauty and the cosmic. There’s this smashing together of these two realities. The wonderousness of nature and the wonderousness of life, the kind of cosmic quality of the essential mysteries of life, and this other thing – this calamity that that is going on that is cultural and man-made and media driven. I wanted to see if I could address that reality, because that is the reality I'm now living in."¹

     

    - Fred Tomaselli

  • 'I don’t know exactly why the birds got back into my work but the newest birds I’ve been doing are...

    "I don’t know exactly why the birds got back into my work but the newest birds I’ve been doing are certainly in a lot more distress. They’re no longer made of flowers. They’re made of plastic objects and consumer materials."

     

    - Fred Tomaselli

  • "The weird thing about when I removed the actual pills and the psychoactive drugs from my work is that the work actually got trippier. When I got rid of the kind of pharmaceutical chemicals, I guess I made up for it by using the buzz of media." 

     

    - Fred Tomaselli

  • 'As in Cubism or Dada, printed words are liberated from the tyranny of syntax and their intended signification, only to...

    "As in Cubism or Dada, printed words are liberated from the tyranny of syntax and their intended signification, only to be conscripted into service—not as representations of seltzer bottles or agents of iconoclasm, but as spokes in the wheels of the cosmos, joining cut-out body parts, leaves, and paint in an orgy of pattern...Tomaselli’s crisp new hallucinations look less like escapism than a clear-eyed demonstration of the importance of form, which shapes reality on every level."²

     

    - Tina Rivers Ryan, Ph.D.

  •  

  • The New York Times Series

     

    There are fourteen new New York Times collages in this exhibition. Since 2005, Tomaselli has engaged in an ongoing body of works on paper that transforms the front page of The New York Times with gouache and collage. Like his resin paintings–with which they have become increasingly intertwined–the Times collages are the product of a friction between the escapist impulse of artmaking and the crises of the world beyond the studio walls. In March of this year, while in quarantine, Tomaselli once again turned to the covers of The New York Times to create a new body of work that attempts to grapple with the enormity of the moment. The surreal compositions are ruminations on the absurdity of news cycles and provide the artist a space to respond to a variety of issues, from regional political squabbles to a global pandemic. As Tomaselli notes, “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.”

  • “This picture is the first one I did [in quarantine]. This woman is walking into the unknown. I wanted to...

    “This picture is the first one I did [in quarantine]. This woman is walking into the unknown. I wanted to make her really stark and make her really isolated, but I also wanted to talk about hope.” 

     

    - Fred Tomaselli

  • new print

  • __________________________________________________________________

    ¹All Fred Tomaselli quotes taken from the online video feature, Fred Tomaselli, produced by James Cohan, 2020. 

    ²Tina Rivers Ryan, "High Times," 2020. Essay commissioned by James Cohan on the occassion of the exhibition Fred Tomaselli, James Cohan, New York, October 23 - November 21, 2020.