Fred Tomaselli
4th June – 9th July 2005, Tuesday to Saturday, 11 a.m. – 6 p.m.
Vernissage 3th June, 6 p.m. - 9 p.m.

On 3th June 2005 carlier | gebauer will be opening two new solo exhibitions. In Arch 51 three new works and a large selection of editions by the American Fred Tomaselli will be presented, whilst in Arch 52 the second solo exhibition by Janaina Tschäpe with a photo series and large- format multi-part drawings will be on display.

Fred Tomaselli, born in 1956 in Santa Monica, USA, has lived in New York since the 1980s and is among the most prominent artists of his generation. His works combine assemblage, painting, relief and collage blended into hybrid tableaux and bring together aesthetic approaches derived from punk, Tantra, Islamic ornamentation, Renaissance painting à la Arcimboldo and the naive transcendence of Rousseau. Tomaselli manages to work in this style without post-Modern irony or citations - the techniques and the subject-matter are equal partners in his work. The most striking aspect of his art is the choice of materials: all kinds of drugs in various different forms: Cannabis leafs, Ecstasy, mescaline, a plethora of brightly coloured pills arranged as long chains, creating cascades and abstract forms under synthetic resin. Furthermore Tomaselli also rifles through anatomy books, magazines, and cuts out images:
hundreds of body parts such as eyes, mouths, ears, sexual organs, as well as blossoms, butterflies, birds, leaves etc. In conjunction with highly pristine sections in acrylic paint, images emerge that are spilling over with realism and the organic. However, the subject-matter of his work is intangible: transcendence, the Other, that which is distant; the notion that every society is constructed around precisely this idea. The promise is to be found in consumption, in drugs, in religion and in technology. His works do not open up a window but instead deliver evidence of the diversity of human attempts to reconfigure body and spirit.

For detailed press information and photos, please contact us by phone +49 (0) 30 280 81 10.
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