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.