"August 31, 2005", 2005 - Fred Tomaselli

Fred Tomaselli has often courted controversy with his use of unconventional materials including consciousness-altering plants and pills. "I want people to get lost in the work," says the artist. "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." The results look part patterned-textile, part mosaic. They depict subjects from the natural world, such as birds and flowers, with lush, jewel-colored tones. His recent hybrid works are all about recycling images from the outside world, usually downloaded off of the Internet, to create heavily patterned, hallucinatory universes of his own making.

In 2009, Prestel published the comprehensive book Fred Tomaselli, which accompanied a survey show of his work from the past 25 years.Read Less