Fred Tomaselli was born in Santa Monica, California, in 1956. He is best known for his highly detailed paintings on wood panels, combining an array of unorthodox materials suspended in a thick layer of clear, epoxy resin. Tomaselli is represented by the White Cube gallery in the United Kingdom and the James Cohan Gallery in the United States. The idea of a “contaminated” image – one that is Post-modern in its borrowing from both high and low culture – permeates his work and was a product of his upbringing in California. In 1982, Tomaselli graduated from California State University-Fullerton with a BA in Painting and Drawing, and went on to become one of the first artists in the 1980s "Downtown L.A." art scene.