Upcoming Exhibitions

Fred Tomaselli
February 6 - June 6, 2010

Ever the idiosyncratic collector, artist Fred Tomaselli amasses actual pills and plants along with a range of images—among them flowers, birds, and anatomical illustrations—carefully cut from books and magazines. Pulling from this visual archive, Tomaselli creates baroque paintings that combine unusual materials and paint under layers of clear epoxy resin. He collages these materials into multilayered combinations of the real, the photographic, and the painterly. Drawing upon a range of art historical sources from Renaissance frescoes to 1960s Minimalism, and eastern and western decorative traditions such as quilts and mosaics, Tomaselli's paintings explode in mesmerizing patterns that appear to grow organically across his compositions. These handmade scenes reveal both troubling and enlightening details of our world.

This survey shows the trajectory of Tomaselli’s career, from early experiments with photography and collage to recent paintings and prints that combine abstraction with allusions to current events. Tomaselli's work reveals a uniquely American vision. Growing up in southern California near the desert, Tomaselli was influenced by both the manufactured unreality of theme parks and the music and drug countercultures of Los Angeles in the 1970s and ’80s. His distinctive melding of these influences forms an updated, personalized, folk-driven vision of the American West. Although deeply personal, his celebration of psychedelic and alternative visions raises provocative questions and possibilities for understanding our inner and outer lives.

Organized by the Tang Teaching Museum and Aspen Art Museum, Fred Tomaselli is a major survey that features over twenty paintings and two-dimensional works from the late 1980s to the present. A fully-illustrated catalogue will accompany the exhibition, featuring texts by Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson, Linda Norden, and David Shields, as well as an extended conversation between the artist and Ian Berry.

Fred Tomaselli is currently on view at the Aspen Art Museum from August 1–October 11, 2009. After its run at the Tang, it will be on view at New York’s Brooklyn Museum from October 8, 2010–January 2, 2011.

Opener 19: Los Carpinteros

April 10 - August 2010

Havana-based collective Los Carpinteros (The Carpenters) create surrealist-inspired sculptures, large-scale installations, and drawings that hover between architecture and furniture, functionality and uselessness. Comprised of master craftsmen Marco Castillo and Dagoberto Rodríguez, Los Carpinteros twist quotidian objects, often fusing domestic commodities with violent or seemingly incongruous elements, such as a jewelry case in the shape of a hand grenade, a couch with an inlaid stove, or metal filing cabinet with an enormous, ill-fitting wooden drawer. Structurally beautiful and often humorous, Los Carpinteros’s work confronts viewers, forcing them to question the production and meaning of the furnishings—themselves icons of modernist commerce—that populate our lives. Working together since the early 1990s, the collective’s work has gradually shifted from a focus on Cuban history to a more globally- and peripatetic-influenced practice.

Opener 20: Paula Hayes

June 2010 - April 2011

Paula Hayes creates living art that intimately connects people with the natural environment. Both living sculptures and mini-ecosystems, Hayes’s work has taken many forms, from blown-glass terrariums, silicone planters, and bird nests and houses to necklaces crocheted to encapsulate living plants and landscape and garden design. By creating art that requires the interaction and care of its owner, Hayes calls into question the traditional understanding of art as a static object, while simultaneously bridging the often-divided natural and human environment. As the artist explains, “In many ways, I’m having to rewrite the way art is perceived or how it’s handled. That it’s not in any static object that one simply preserves, [but] it is evolving with how it’s maintained.” Hayes’s project at the Tang will be comprised of a gallery exhibition as well as outdoor and indoor plantings, and furniture and tableware that will provide a setting for a series of dinners and conversations to mark the tenth anniversary of the Tang Museum.