David Salle

David Salle (born September 28, 1952, Norman, Oklahoma, U.S.) is an American painter who, together with such contemporaries as Julian Schnabel and Robert Longo, regenerated big, gestural, expressionist painting after years of pared-down minimalism and conceptual art. Salle is known for mixing modes of representation and appropriated ready-made motifs in a single canvas, suggesting but defying any legible narrative. Employing the postmodern technique of pastiche, where the close display of disparate images and styles tends to reduce everything to equivalent signs, Salle’s paintings function as metaphors for the dizzying onslaught of media culture.

Salle grew up in Wichita, Kansas, and from 1973 to 1975 attended the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), where he studied with John Baldessari. In 1976 he moved to New York City, where he found work in a publishing house that specialized in romance and pornography magazines and began to collect images from its archive. His earliest work involved the strategy of overlaying images, and this quickly became his signature style.

Salle’s paintings reflect what is essentially a collage aesthetic, whereby he takes images out of their original context and recontextualizes them into complex ensembles. Like Robert Rauschenberg before him, Salle denied any hierarchy of subject matter by including both “high” and “low” imagery in a single canvas: famous art masterpieces with cartoon figures, high-end designed objects with pornographic imagery, and ornamental motifs with reproductions of newspaper photos, for example. In addition to mixing high and low imagery, Salle also mixed differing styles, including contour line drawings, modeled motifs, found objects, grisaille, crudely rendered images, and highly polished forms. Notable examples included Brother Animal (1983) and Muscular Paper (1985). Although he denied any iconographic intent in his pictures, his consistent use of aggressively posed nude women elicited much response from feminists and others who objected to the voyeuristic nature of his art.

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Salle’s other work included costume and set design for Kathy Acker’s play Birth of the Poet in 1985 and for a number of pieces by Karole Armitage—with whom he had a relationship for seven years—including The Mollino Room (1985), Time is the echo of an axe within a wood (2004), and Connoisseurs of Chaos (2008). He also directed the feature film Search and Destroy (1995). He frequently exhibited his current work, including such portrait diptychs as Swamp Music (2013) and such cartoon paintings as Self-Ironing Pants (2019). He also published a collection of essays, How to See: Looking, Talking, and Thinking About Art (2016).