David Salle

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David Salle (born 1952 in Norman, Oklahoma) is an American painter. He earned a BFA and MFA from the California Institute for the Arts, where he studied under John Baldessari. David Salle’s work first came to widespread public attention in New York in the early 1980s. His paintings comprised what looked like randomly juxtaposed images, or images painted one over another. His paint handling was disparate, ill-matched, and seemed often deliberately ham-fisted. His subject matter tended toward the popular, the gratuitous, and the pornographic, and was combined in ways that appeared deliberately incomprehensible. Cynical, calculating, and cold were some of the more polite words that were applied to him. He seemed to be spoiling for a fight: not only ignorant of painting’s qualities but disrespectful of its possibilities. In the next few years he and his contemporaries - termed ‘postmodern’ when that word was being pressed into service as a style label - achieved a classic succès de scandale, and along with artists from Germany and Italy in particular, they seemed to turn aesthtics on their head. Salle in particular seemed particularly irksome – engaging in public arguments with his detractors, and refusing to keep professionally still. Not only did he keep painting his difficult paintings, he turned his hand to set and costume design, photography, and – perhaps most irritatingly for those were going to be irritated – directing mainstream cinema.

Since then, he has earned the reputation as one of the most influential representational painters of the latter half of the 20th century.

External links

[David Salle at Lehmann Maupin Gallery]
[David Salle at Gagosian Gallery]
[David Salle at The Saatchi Gallery] Additional information on David Salle including artworks, text panels, articles and full biography

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