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Provenance: James Cohan Gallery, New York
Acquired by the present owner from the above in 2006

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Exhibited: New York, James Cohan Gallery, Fred Tomaselli, October - November 2006

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Notes: Fred Tomaselli's paintings exquisitely fuse an array of found and unorthodox materials suspended in a dense layer of clear epoxy resin, poised between reality and the sublime. Assembling medicinal herbs, prescription pills and hallucinogenic plants with images cut from books and magazines, he creates intricate dazzling patterns that glitter across the surface of his paintings. Having grown up in Los Angeles at the end of the punk and hippie eras, Tomaselli maintains the influences of this counter-cultural fusion in his work, aiming to balance, as he has said, "precariously between ecstasy and apocalypse, in that it simultaneously acknowledges the mess we're in, while still finding what's left of the luminous."

All too aptly, the present work, Abductor of 2006, is the artist's direct response to the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. Within its dazzling kaleidoscopic composition, Tomaselli uniquely freezes a conical tornado form releasing lines of collaged eyes, mouths, arms and hands in the preservational medium of resin. Divorced from their original scale, these multiplied images of body parts recognize the many affected by this calamitous disaster while creating new, larger abstract forms seductive in their shimmering, jewel-toned, starry composition. Through the layered components of Abductor, Tomaselli pays homage to this historical destructive disaster while providing a conduit out of reality, a transcendent awareness of a shimmering future beyond.