For many artists, the lure of the garden is inescapable. It’s easy to see why: for figures who built their careers working with their hands, nurturing beauty, and making something out of nothing, the botanical realm is an apt metaphor. Derek Jarman famously tended one at his Dungeness cottage. So did Robert Irwin, who planted a 134,000 square foot garden at the heart of the Getty Center. Now, Fred Tomaselli offers his own take on cultivating Eden in his newest exhibition, “Blooms Disrupted,” opening May 15 at James Cohan’s 48 Walker Street location.
Born in Santa Monica in 1956 and based in Brooklyn since the mid-1980s, Tomaselli has built his reputation on densely layered resin paintings that embed organic matter—leaves, herbs, pharmaceutical pills—into surfaces that seem to vibrate with hallucinatory light. An avid urban gardener himself, he demonstrates that botanical design and the patient pace of the natural world are far more than just watching grass grow. Blue Ohana, 2025, is explosive and kaleidoscopic, referencing another art world Arcadia: the garden at the estate of Frederic Edwin Church, a luminary of the Hudson River School.
The show debuts a series of these maximalist resin paintings alongside a fresh group of collages made from New York Times front pages. In doing so, he presents the garden as a respite and an alternative to the deluge of media noise and crises that suffuse the headlines. The exhibition’s anchor piece, Month of August (evening), unites the two series. In the work, a geometric spiral radiates outward from the canvas center, its lines built entirely from headlines drawn from the August 2025 issues of the Times. Beneath that lattice of language, a Mexican sunflower—assembled from personal photographs—blooms in still life, some blossoms pinned under text, others pushing through into open air.
In “Blooms Disrupted,” those surfaces turn into a garden packed with urgent provocation. Tomaselli approaches nature not as scenery, but as an immersive, destabilizing force—something to move through rather than simply observe. The Times collages, a practice spanning more than two decades, find new urgency alongside the artist’s resin paintings. Tomaselli replaces front-page stories with those originally granted less prominence—pieces concerning climate, immigration, political strife beyond America—forcing a reordering of what the paper, and by extension the culture, chooses to see.
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