James Cohan is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by Fred Tomaselli, on view from October 23 through November 21 at 48 Walker Street. This is the artist's sixth solo exhibition with James Cohan and his first major presentation of new paintings in New York since 2014.
These new paintings represent the first significant body of work to marry Tomaselli’s intricate resin paintings with his ongoing New York Times drawings. Tomaselli's works explode in mesmerizing patterns that appear to grow organically across his compositions. Their various components—organic matter from his garden, collaged elements from printed sources, and hand-painted fauna and ornament—are all suspended in gleaming layers of clear, polished, hard resin. The incorporation of New York Times headlines into this psychedelically abundant imagery creates moments of absurdist narrative and passages of Burroughs-esque accidental poetry. These paintings are the product of a world in perpetual crisis, in which the internalized world of the studio is penetrated by the external state of emergency via a steady stream of media. As Tomaselli notes, these works are an attempt to grapple with “how great it is to be alive in the world, and how fucked up that world is—two things that are true, simultaneously.”
The exhibition will also feature a selection of new New York Times works on paper created during quarantine.