Fred Tomaselli’s works frequently combine bold graphic forms or intricate patterns with detritus from popular culture, nature, and mass media. His materials include pills and drugs, butterfly wings, and, as in this composition, fragments of magazines and newspapers. Tessellating images like the tiles of a mosaic, Tomaselli uses resin and other binding agents to create a flat, unified panel surface. By allowing the noise of the world to erupt into the highly composed spaces of his pictures, Tomaselli cuts against abstraction’s supposed universality, asserting its origin in particular—and fleeting—spaces and times.

In 1989 Tomaselli made Remedy, an homage to Barnett Newman’s The Wild. Using materials from the frame shop where he then worked, he built a tall, thin picture frame that contained a year’s worth of aspirin tablets stacked one on top of another.