Fred Tomaselli

James Cohan is pleased to present Blooms Disrupted, an exhibition of new and recent work by Fred Tomaselli, on view from May 15 through June 27, 2026, at the gallery’s 48 Walker Street location. This is Tomaselli’s seventh solo exhibition with James Cohan. The gallery will host an opening reception with the artist on Friday, May 15 from 6-8 PM.

For over forty years, Fred Tomaselli has invoked the power of nature through deftly constructed maximalist paintings and works on paper. Tomaselli’s singular painting approach fuses organic matter, photographic reproductions, and dense ornamentation into surfaces that seem to pulse with their own internal light. His work has always moved between registers: the microscopic and the cosmic, the botanical and the geometric, the careful study of the shape of nature and the vertigo of deep space. In Blooms Disrupted, the garden is Tomaselli’s primary subject, which he uses to consider the natural world as a counterweight to the urgent rush of news and media that so often interrupts our private realities. Inspired by visits to Robert Irwin’s gardens at the Getty in Los Angeles, and informed by his own history as an urban gardener, Tomaselli set out to create paintings that render nature not as a backdrop but as an immersive event in all of its awesome complexity. These intensely tactile and painterly works view the garden not only as a space for deep observation, but also as a laboratory in which a new vision of the natural world might be constructed, one that pushes against continued degradation and advocates for preservation and communal care.

The new resin paintings included in the exhibition imagine the garden as a space just as explosive, dynamic and full of possibility as the cosmos itself. In Blue Olana (2025)—which references the garden at the estate of Frederic Edwin Church, a central figure of the Hudson River School—Tomaselli presents a botanical world of kaleidoscopic detail, one where fertile flowers reveal themselves to be constructed collages, and tightly rendered vines snake and twist in the foreground before opening up into a deep blue sky above. Plum Tree (2025) shows the titular tree as an anchoring presence in the composition, with outstretched branches and a canopy of leaves carefully embedded both within and on top of the resin surface. A collage of flowers and energetic embellishments mingle with carefully described ferns, weeds and a breadth of foliage at once familiar and strange. By collapsing distinctions between time, location and season into a single composition, Tomaselli creates imaginary worlds where nature can exist in an otherwise impossible arrangement.

A new group of New York Times collages extends Tomaselli's long practice of making raw material from the daily news, finding fresh methods to disrupt and memorialize moments in time. For more than two decades, he has taken the front page of the paper as a point of departure before altering the headlines and reimagining the images with gouache and collage, creating surreal compositions in which aspiration and critique become inseparable. Where the Times formats reality into an authoritative structure—the bold headline, the columns in formation, the photograph above the fold—Tomaselli answers with irregular forms, optical vibration, and a chromatic restlessness that exposes the newspaper's claim to neutrality and truth as the constructions they have always been. In these new collages, Tomaselli replaces the dominant front-page text and imagery with stories originally granted less prominence, yet which address urgent issues about nature and climate change, immigration and political strife.

In Month of August (evening) (2026), the two bodies of work converge. A geometric spiral radiates outward from the center of the composition, each of its lines comprising text drawn from the headlines of the August 2025 issues of the Times.  Under this lattice of language, a Mexican sunflower plant unfolds in still life, its blossoms assembled from personal photographs and collaged into a form that reads as both a flower and an archive of one. Some blooms remain pinned beneath text that reads like an absurdist poem, while others push through, reaching past the headlines into open air. That the Mexican sunflower peaks in August, arriving at its fullest expression precisely as the month's worth of headlines accumulates around it, makes the image all the more pointed; nature performs at the height of its capacity while the world registers disruption. In holding these two forces against each other—the ceaseless weight of the news and the quiet persistence of a growing thing—Tomaselli finds the question that runs throughout all of Blooms Disrupted: can we remain present in our own life inside a world that presses constantly, and loudly, against it?