Fred Tomaselli - Contemporary Art Part II New York Friday, May 13, 2011 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Christopher Grimes Gallery, Santa Monica; Sale: New York, Phillips de Pury & Company, Contemporary Art Part II, November 14, 2008, Lot 131

  • Exhibited

    Santa Monica, Christopher Grimes Gallery, Fred Tomaselli, February 19 - March 19, 1994; Palm Beach, The Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art, Fred Tomaselli: Ten Year Survey, December 10, 2001 - March 3, 2002; Santa Fe, SITE Santa Fe, March 16 - May 2, 2002; Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, The Cranbrook Art Museum, Transfigurations: The Body in 20th Century Art, September 20 - November 30, 2003

  • Literature

    A. Tager and D. A. Greene, Fred Tomaselli, Santa Monica, 1995, n.p. (illustrated); A. Cappellazzo, ed., Fred Tomaselli: Ten Year Survey, Palm Beach, 2001, n.p., (illustrated)

  • Catalogue Essay

    Using the technique of collage, which served the Cubists as the catalyst of painterly abstraction, [Fred Tomaselli] chooses objects and arrangements not for what they represent, even in the case of photographic illustrations, but for what they meant within their original contexts….The elements are not just metaphors. They are concrete examples of the artifice involved in manufacturing serviceable contemporary substitutes for utopia. Mean while, the glassy resin surface of Tomaselli’s works remind us that even the imperfect transcendence promised by these materials remains inaccessible, locked away among the failed revolutions and irretrievable values from a past we might prefer to disown. Tomaselli’s paintings evoke our continuing psychological dependence on modes of transcendence in which we have lost all faith, and even learned to regard as suspect: utopianism, drubs, spirituality, nature and the sublime.

    (A. Cappellazzo, Fred Tomasell: Ten Year Survey, Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art, Lake Worth, Florida 2001, n.p.)

158

Exploded Version

1993
Acrylic, resin, aspirin, antacid, acetaminophen, ephedrine and saccharin pills on panel.
47 1/2 x 47 1/2 in. (120.7 x 120.7 cm).
Signed, titled and dated "Fred Tomaselli 'Exploded Version' 1993" on the reverse.

Estimate
$150,000 - 200,000 

Sold for $170,500

Contemporary Art Part II

13 May 2011
New York