Born in 1956, in Santa Monica, California, Fred Tomaselli is an American visual artist best known for his psychedelic collage paintings. Tomaselli received his BFA in drawing and painting from California State University, Fullerton, in 1982. For much of the 80’s, however, Tomaselli stopped painting, working instead in performance and installation art. During a lecture at the Chicago Humanities Festival in 2013 he explained, “I just couldn’t understand what paintings were for, or how they were relevant to my life…and was more attracted to new materials and new media.” At a certain point, however, Tomaselli began to reconsider painting, becoming increasingly interested in what he describes as, “the idea of a painting as a window to another reality, this idea of losing yourself in the sublime and transcendental.” Eventually, he would return to painting, using a wide variety of materials including plants and organic matter, pharmaceutical drugs, medicinal herbs, newspapers, and magazine cut outs. In his work, Tomaselli often explores tensions between the real and the unreal, between nature and human culture, and between the promises and failings of utopia.

Tomaselli’s work has exhibited extensively across the US and internationally. Major solo exhibitions of his work have been held at the Joslyn Art Museum (2019); the Oceanside Museum of Art (2018); the Toledo Museum of Art (2016); the Orange County Museum of Art (2015); the University of Michigan Museum of Art (2014); the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (2014), the Brooklyn Museum (2010); the Aspen Art Museum (2009), The Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University (2005); Irish Museum of Modern Art (2005); The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh (2004); the Whitney Museum of American Art (1999), and elsewhere. He is the recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant in (1998) and the New York’s Public Design Commission Annual Award for Excellence in Design (1992). His work is held in museum collections across the country including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Brooklyn Museum, the Buffalo AKG Museum, the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Orange County Museum of Art, the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, among others.