About the Work
On a newsprint image from The New York Times, Fred Tomaselli has traced the floodwaters left by Hurricane Katrina in the streets of New Orleans using a web of interlocking colored bands, leaving the distant skyscrapers in the downtown area of the city unaltered. On the faded newsprint, these buildings appear ghostly in comparison to the brightly colored water tearing through the streets like an unstoppable virus.
About the Artist
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.
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