Fred Tomaselli

Expecting to Fly (for the Zeros), 2013

7569 Girard Avenue

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Fred Tomaselli’s highly detailed mural, Expecting to Fly (for the Zeros), honors the late, great Chula Vista based Chicano Punk band, The Zeros. It combines cutout images of insects, animals, plants, butterflies, birds, and body parts to create a visionary image of a man falling through space. The title of this work, Expecting to Fly, is the title of a song written by Neil Young and performed by Buffalo Springfield in the late '60's. The man falling through space can be read as a crowd surfer, an image that comes out of the Punk Rock movement. One traditional idea of the "sublime" deals with losing oneself to the vastness of the universe. In this case, the crowd-surfer is losing himself to the vast, collectivist "organism" of the crowd. “In this piece I try to find commonalities in the pursuit of a modern sublime that stretch through time and past ideologies”.

Fred Tomaselli’s work begins with the pre-modernist ideal that paintings have the ability to alter perception and transport the viewer into new worlds. Tomaselli was born in 1956 in Santa Monica, California. He received a BA in Drawing and Painting from California State University, Fullerton. Tomaselli explores art’s ability to alter consciousness and conjure the sublime in a way that has an uncanny resemblance to some of the rhetoric around mind expansion. Starting with that, he references the social and historical context that brackets this behavior and then adds a bunch of other things to make his work. His paintings vacillate between the pre-modernist window and the modernist mirror. Often incorporating collage, his work includes medicinal herbs, prescription pills, and hallucinogenic plants alongside cut images from books and magazines. These unorthodox materials are suspended in a thick layer of clear, epoxy resin to create highly detailed, mixed media collage on wood panels.

Tomaselli has had numerous solo exhibitions including at the Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha; White Cube, London; Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth; the University of Michigan Museum of Art; the Oceanside Museum of Art, Oceanside, California; the Brooklyn Museum, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Tomaselli lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

22' x 22'

Wall Sponsors: Lisa Braun Glazer and Jeff Glazer

Photos by Philipp Scholz Rittermann