About the Work
On the September 15, 2005 edition of The New York Times, Fred Tomaselli alters the disturbing front page image of bomb victims in Baghdad, drawing over the photograph with a colorful flower pattern. The swirling vines, reminiscent of traditional Islamic arabesques, distract from the horror of the subject, a suicide bombing that killed nearly 150 people in Iraq.
This work is representative of Tomaselli's recent experimentations with appropriating images from the media and modifying them to manipulate the viewer's perception. The initial response to this work is a purely visual reaction to the intricate design, and it is only upon further examination that the second level of interaction with the political implications of the image emerge.
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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