Fred Tomaselli (b. 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.
He grew up in Orange, California. He attended and graduated from Orange High School where what he has described as ‘artificial, immersive, theme park reality’ as a normal part of everyday life. The idea of a ‘contaminated’ image – one that is Post-modern in its borrowing from both high and low culture – permeates his work.
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. 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.
‘I want people to get lost in the work. I want to seduce people into it and I want people to escape inside the world of the work. In that way the work is pre-Modernist. I throw all of my obsessions and loves into the work, and I try not to be too embarrassed about any of it. I love nature, I love gardening, I love watching birds, and all of that gets into the work. I just try to be true to who I am and make the work I want to see. I don’t have a radical agenda.’
Tomaselli sees his paintings and their compendium of data as windows into a surreal, hallucinatory universe. ‘It is my ultimate aim,’ he says, ‘to seduce and transport the viewer in to space of these pictures while simultaneously revealing the mechanics of that seduction.’ Tomaselli has also incorporated allegorical figures into his work – in ‘Untitled (Expulsion)’ (2000), for example, he borrows the Adam and Eve figures from Masaccio’s ‘Expulsion from the Garden of Eden’ (1426–27), and in ‘Field Guides’ (2003) he creates his own version of the grim reaper. His figures are described anatomically so that their organs and veins are exposed in the manner of a scientific drawing. He writes that his ‘inquiry into utopia/dystopia – framed by artifice but motivated by the desire for the real – has turned out to be the primary subject of my work.’
The Daily Omnivore 
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