Fred Tomaselli: Paper

Fred Tomaselli White Cube

An exhibition of new and recent works by Fred Tomaselli. As its title suggests, the exhibition focuses on works on paper and includes photograms, collages and interventions onto the front page of The New York Times.Tomaselli began working on ‘The Times’ series in 2005 during the Bush administration and has increasingly focused on this project in the ensuing years. Using large-scale digital facsimiles of the newspaper’s front page, these works highlight the tragedy, reality and absurdity of global politics through the addition of a combination of abstract, sardonic and cosmic imagery. Seeing his intervention into this ‘paper of record’, as just another subjective, editorial decision, among the many that go into the production of news, Tomaselli attempts to engage directly with both the images and accompanying

Tomaselli began working on ‘The Times’ series in 2005 during the Bush administration and has increasingly focused on this project in the ensuing years. Using large-scale digital facsimiles of the newspaper’s front page, these works highlight the tragedy, reality and absurdity of global politics through the addition of a combination of abstract, sardonic and cosmic imagery. Seeing his intervention into this ‘paper of record’, as just another subjective, editorial decision, among the many that go into the production of news, Tomaselli attempts to engage directly with both the images and accompanying text.

Titled simply with the date on which they were published, the works are the record of important events from the past few years, albeit distributed via a medium that, in the face of increasing digital information, is fast disappearing. Tomaselli has noted that these political, bucolic images are the ‘daily facts’ of his own life, offering a time line of his own experiences. Seeking to stop time and allow the works to resonate as their facts ‘vaporize into obsolescence’, landmark events are frozen and presented for closer scrutiny: the ‘perp-walk’ by bad actors, the warming of the planet or the actions of global leaders.

Both emotive and humorous, these pictorial subversions of familiar news images recall the dark humour of the German Expressionists, but more specifically the ‘Constellation’ drawings of Joan Miró begun in 1939 at the outset of WWII. In these drawings Miró arranged abstract shapes on paper like a constellation of stars, appearing to offer a serene, cosmic and infinite vision which transcended the horrors of the daily destruction of war. Similarly, Tomaselli says he is attempting to convey the ‘bipolar relationship between beauty and pain’ that defines current existence. In one work, for example, a Ukrainian woman mourning the tragedy of the Malaysian plane crash, carries a bouquet of flowers that obscures her face, the forms of which have been extended with real leaves, paint and photo-collage, into a stylised, all-over Mogul-like pattern spreading across the entire image. In another, a team of negotiators in the Iran nuclear deal burn out their eyes by staring into the sun, our solar system’s original nuclear furnace.

Duration 17 March 2017 - 13 May 2017
Times Tuesday - Saturday 10am - 6pm
Cost Free
Venue White Cube - Mason's Yard
Address 25-26 Mason's Yard (Off Duke Street), London, SW1Y 6BU
Contact 2079305373 / enquiries@whitecube.com / www.whitecube.com

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