Fred Tomaselli exhibition to open Feb. 6

Leaves, stems, and pills join carefully cut out pictures of flowers, birds, and body parts in Fred Tomaselli's exquisitely rendered and visually seductive paintings.

A survey of the Brooklyn-based artist's works, from early drawings and photographs to recent paintings and prints, will appear in the exhibition Fred Tomaselli, which opens Feb. 6 at the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery and remains on view there through June 6, 2010.

Co-organized by the Tang Museum and the Aspen Art Museum in Aspen, Colo., and co-curated by Tang Malloy Curator Ian Berry and Aspen Director and Chief Curator Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson, Fred Tomaselli features more than 20 paintings and two-dimensional works from the early 1990s to the present.

The exhibition showcases Tomaselli's virtuosic mix of unlikely media: pills ranging from aspirin to Dexedrine; the leaves of hemp and other plants he grows in his Brooklyn garden; and thousands of images of bodies, birds, and flowers cut from books and magazines and archived by the artist. Tomaselli combines these disparate elements into elaborate and detailed images encased under layers of highly polished resin.

Among the works to appear at the Tang are Untitled (Expulsion) (2000), a ten-by-seven?foot tour de forcedepicting Adam and Eve's banishment from the Garden of Eden, their gestures echoing those in a fresco by Renaissance artist Masaccio.In Tomaselli's version, the couple's circulatory systems are startlingly visible, and the angel ordering them out of the garden appears as an explosion of radiating lines composed of pills, mushrooms, leaves, and a tornado of flowers, insects, birds, and human feet, lips, and eyes. Among the exhibition's smaller works is an 8 -by10-inch digital print titled Greater Pewee, Olive-sided Flycatcher, Eastern Wood-Pewee, Western Wood-Pewee (2004).At first glance, the print looks like a page from a Peterson Field Guide but a closer view reveals that the birds' bright plumage is wittily collaged from catalogue images ofcontemporaryouterwear.

Three public events will accompany the exhibition: Tomaselli will join Tang curator Ian Berry for a Dunkerley Dialogue at 5 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 6, followed by the Tang's spring opening reception from 6:30 to 7:30 p.m. A curator's tour of the exhibition will begin at noon Tuesday, Feb 23.

Born in Santa Monica in 1956, Tomaselli grew up in southern California, influenced by the alternate realities of Disneyland and other theme parks and by the music and drug countercultures of Los Angeles in the 1970s and '80s. He has had solo exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art, SITE Santa Fe, the Albright-Knox Gallery of Art, and the Rose Art Museum, among others. His work has been included in numerous international group exhibitions, including the 2001 Berlin Biennale, the 2002 Liverpool Biennial, the 2004 SITE Santa Fe Biennial, and the 2004 Whitney Biennial.

The exhibition, which debuted at the Aspen Art Museum last August, is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue published by Prestel Publications, in partnership with the Tang and the Aspen Art Museum. After closing June 6 at the Tang, the exhibition will go on to the Brooklyn Museum in Brooklyn, N.Y., where it will be on view Oct. 8, 2010?Jan. 2, 2011.

For more information, visit the Tang's web site, or call 518-580-8080.