Variation Is the Exploration of Possibilities

B in 1956, American artist Fred Tomaselli grew up in Orange, California, and in 1982, he graduated from California State University, Fullerton, with a degree in painting and drawing. In the early 1980s, Tomaselli became established in the “Downtown L.A.” art, music, and drug countercultures. Since 1985, he has lived and worked in Brooklyn, New York. He is best known for his visually stunning hybrid creations—part painting and part mosaicand for his series of collages based on front-page articles from The New York Times. His works have been exhibited widely throughout the world and are in collections at many prominent museums. Tomaselli collects and incorporates unusual materials into his works, including pharmaceutical and street drugs and myriad images of plants, birds, and body parts cut from catalogs and magazines, suspending them in layers of clear epoxy resin. If bugs, leaves, and other debris become trapped in the sticky resin, Tomaselli keeps them.