Interview

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Fred Tomaselli first earned street cred in the 1970s, for his involvement in the underground Los Angeles punk and new wave music scene, when his drawings were published in Slash (fanzine), an LA punk rock magazine. In the 1980s, he emerged as an installation and performance artist with Paul McCarthy and other California artists. Living on the Pacific Coast, surfboards were Tomaselli's natural vehicles for escape, and resin was a familiar medium in his artwork. His very West-Coast interest in drug culture informed the artist's interest in creating "sublime experiences" in reaction to the "theme parks and dislocated realities" he experienced growing up in Southern California.

Tomaselli moved East in 1986, settling into a studio in then-dodgy Williamsburg, where he turned to painting as a window to another reality. Over the years Tomaselli has carefully assembled an archive—an herbarium of sorts—of weeds, plants, pills, speed, insects, flowers, birds, and anatomical illustrations, carefully cut from books and digital scans. He makes baroque paintings that draw upon a range of art historical sources and decorative traditions, like quilts and mosaics. Combining unusual materials and paint under layers of clear epoxy resin, Tomaselli's paintings explode in mesmerizing patterns that appear to grow organically across his compositions in a multilayered coexistence of the real, the photographic, and the painterly.

It's fitting that Tomaselli's first museum survey exhibition, featuring a curated selection of his two-dimensional work from the late 1980s to the present, would be held in Aspen where the drug culture burgeoned in the late 50s, ushering in the hippie culture of the 60s when tripped out kids in Aspen celebrated the 1967 Summer of Love experience that Hunter S. Thompson dubbed "wild and incredible dopey." It was doubly-fitting that the after party for his opening was held at the Aspen home of Lucy Sharp Dikeou—whose monogram, LSD, was ticked along the cocktail napkins.


Fred Tomaselli is on view at the Aspen Art Museum through October 11.