Fred Tomaselli

Fred Tomaselli was born in 1956 in Santa Monica, California. He earned a BA in Drawing and Painting from California State University, Fullerton, and moved to Brooklyn, New York, in 1985, where he continues to live and work.

Tomaselli's paintings and works on paper combine collage, drawing, and resin. He is best known for incorporating actual pills, leaves, and images of hallucinogenic plants alongside cut imagery from newspapers and magazines, including a recurring series built directly on printed pages of The New York Times. The work has been read consistently as an exploration of altered consciousness, media saturation, and the natural world under pressure from human intervention.

His exhibition history includes a 2009 survey at the Aspen Art Museum and a subsequent traveling survey that opened at the Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore College in mid-2010 before moving to the Brooklyn Museum later that year and into early 2011. He has shown repeatedly with James Cohan in New York since at least 2020, most recently with the 2026 exhibition Blooms Disrupted, and mounted a 2024 solo show, Second Nature, at the Laguna Art Museum in California. He is also represented by White Cube in London. He remains an active, exhibiting artist as of mid-2026.

No verbatim assessment from a named critic at a major outlet could be confirmed for this profile, so critical reception here rests on institutional framing rather than direct quotation. Museums and galleries consistently describe Tomaselli's work as sitting at the intersection of collage, drawing, and psychedelic imagery, using found and pharmaceutical material to address altered states, nature, and the density of contemporary media. That reading has held steady across his 2009 Aspen Art Museum survey, his 2010 to 2011 Tang Teaching Museum and Brooklyn Museum traveling survey, and his continuing series of solo exhibitions with James Cohan, most recently in 2026.

Tomaselli's highest reported auction result is approximately USD 1,650,500 for a painting, per MutualArt's market summary. The specific work, auction house, and exact sale date could not be independently confirmed from available sources. Artprice records roughly 259 auction lots for the artist to date, a modest total that suggests a market built more on gallery and museum activity than on a deep secondary market. He is represented by James Cohan in New York, which has mounted several of his solo shows over the past six years, and by White Cube in London.

No catalogue raisonne has been confirmed for Tomaselli, so provenance and authentication rest primarily on gallery documentation and exhibition history rather than a published scholarly record. His auction market is thin relative to his museum standing: the exact date and venue of his auction record could not be independently confirmed, and the overall volume of lots at auction is modest, so any single result should be read in that context rather than as a smooth trend line. His representation has been stable, with James Cohan in New York and White Cube in London as his primary galleries, which is a useful continuity signal for anyone tracking the primary market around his exhibitions.