ASPEN, CO.- Beginning with a free public reception with the artist at 3:00 p.m., on Saturday, August 1, 2009, the Aspen Art Museum is proud to announce the debut of internationally celebrated American artist Fred Tomaselli’s largest museum survey exhibition to date—featuring a curatorial selection of the artist’s two-dimensional work from the late 1980s to the present.

Organized by the Aspen Art Museum, the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, and co-curated by AAM Director and Chief Curator Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson and Ian Berry, Associate Director and Malloy Curator at the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, Fred Tomaselli will be on view at the AAM through Sunday, October 11, 2009, and then travel to the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, (February 6 – June 6, 2010), and New York’s Brooklyn Museum (October 8, 2010 – January 2, 2011). A fully-illustrated color catalogue with texts by David Shields, Linda Norden, Berry , and Zuckerman Jacobson is being produced on the occasion of the exhibition.

In addition, Tomaselli will be the first artist to be simultaneously represented in a solo exhibition at the AAM and celebrated as an Aspen Award for Art honoree. The 2009 award will be presented to Tomaselli by Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson on Friday, August 7, 2009, during the museum’s annual artCRUSH summer benefit event. Tomaselli is the fifth recipient of the award, given each year to an internationally respected artist that has exhibited, or is scheduled to exhibit, at the AAM. Tomaselli’s work was previously featured at the AAM as part of the museum’s 2006, twenty-five-artist group exhibition, Having New Eyes. The annual Aspen Award for Art award has been presented at the artCRUSH summer benefit since the debut of the event in 2005.

Fred Tomaselli
Ever the idiosyncratic collector, Fred Tomaselli amasses pills, herbs and other drugs, along with a range of images—plants, flowers, birds, anatomical illustrations—cut from books and organized by color, to create multilayered baroque paintings that encompass elements of the real, the photographic, and the painterly. Drawing upon art historical sources and Eastern and Western decorative traditions—like quilts and mosaics—Tomaselli's works explode in mesmerizing, psychedelic patterns that appear to grow organically across his compositions. Born in Santa Monica , California in 1956, and raised in Southern California, Tomaselli’s influences can be traced to both by the manufactured unreality of theme parks, and the music and drug counter-cultures of Los Angeles during the 1970s and 80s.

Fred Tomaselli’s solo exhibitions include the Whitney Museum of American Art, Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art, SITE Santa Fe , Albright-Knox Gallery of Art, and the Rose Art Museum . His work has also 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. He currently lives in New York .