Fred Tomaselli

Art Brokerage: Fred Tomaselli American Artist: b. 1956. He (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. Tomaselli is represented by the White Cube gallery in the UK and the James Cohan Gallery in the USA. Tomaselli grew up in Orange, California. He attended and graduated from Orange High School where what he has described as "artificial, immersive, theme park reality" was a normal part of everyday life and the idea of a "contaminated" "image" one that is Post-modern in its borrowing from both high and low culture permeates his work. In 1982, he graduated from California State University, Fullerton with a B.A. in Painting and Drawing. He became one of the first artists in the 1980s "Downtown L.A." art scene. He had ties to the growing punk and new wave music community and his drawings were published in Slash, an L.A. punk rock magazine. To partially support himself, he worked at a manager at Gorky's Cafe, a restaurant and local artist hangout founded by Judith Markoff (a retired schoolteacher). In the morning, he could usually be seen smoking a cigarette and drinking coffee reading the L.A. Times with his elbows on the table and his hands covering his ears to block out the ambient noise. Tomaselli often dressed in a punk geek-chique style sporting red rimmed plastic glasses, a button down shirt, cardigan sweater and jeans. 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 dazzling patterns that spread over the surface of the painting like a beautiful 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. Listings wanted.