Fred Tomaselli valuation
Embeds pills, leaves and cut-out eyes in resin, and builds them into hallucinatory patterns.
Fred Tomaselli was born in Santa Monica in 1956, grew up beside Disneyland, and has worked in Brooklyn since the 1980s.
What a work by Fred Tomaselli is worth
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation is free, made online from the photographs you send, and it commits you to nothing. We act for sellers across the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States.
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Bio
Fred Tomaselli was born in Santa Monica in 1956, grew up beside Disneyland, and has worked in Brooklyn since the 1980s. The paintings are built up on panel from collaged photographic fragments — eyes, hands, birds, flowers cut from field guides and magazines — together with real pharmaceuticals, cannabis leaves, insects and pigment, then sealed under many poured layers of clear resin so the whole thing lies under glassy depth. He also makes altered front pages of the New York Times, painting over the photograph while leaving the headline in place.
The resin panels are unusual objects and their condition is the practical question: poured resin yellows over time, is prone to scratching and to internal bubbling, and cannot be refinished without disturbing the embedded material, so light history and surface condition weigh heavily. The presence of controlled substances in some earlier works raises its own questions for international shipping and should be established before a sale is arranged. The New York Times works on paper and the print editions are the accessible part of the output.
At a glance
- Born
- 1956, Santa Monica
The Whitney, White Cube and the Brooklyn survey
Tomaselli's solo exhibitions include the Whitney Museum in New York in 1999 and the Rose Art Museum in Massachusetts in 2005, and a survey organised by the Aspen Art Museum was shown at the Brooklyn Museum in 2010. He has shown with White Cube in London and James Cohan in New York.
The monograph by Ian Berry and Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson, published with the Aspen survey in 2009, illustrates many of the resin paintings. For a panel, the title and date, with the gallery's documentation and its record of the materials, are what identify it.
Masaccio, Field Guides and the album covers
Some of the paintings borrow figures from earlier art: Untitled (Expulsion), of 2000, takes Adam and Eve from Masaccio's Expulsion from the Garden of Eden, and Field Guides, of 2003, is his own version of the grim reaper, its figures drawn with organs and veins exposed like an anatomical plate. He has had solo exhibitions at the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh in 2004 and the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin in 2005, and in America at the Albright-Knox in Buffalo in 2003, the University of Michigan Museum of Art in 2014, the Orange County Museum of Art in 2015 and the Joslyn Art Museum in 2019.
His pictures are on a number of album covers, among them Laura Cantrell's Humming by the Flowered Vine and Phish's Joy of 2009, and his painting Gravity in Four Directions appears on the cover of the Magnetic Fields' i. His work is also reproduced in The Wilco Book.
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