Overview
The distortion of the motifs is a testimony to his excellent command of modern graphics software.
Like many artists of his generation, David Salle largely drew the inspiration for his rich visual vocabulary from existing pictures. Based on models from art history, advertisements, design, and everyday culture, Salle creates an assemblage with manifold cultural references. Since the mid eighties, his paintings have included allusions to the works of the Baroque painters Velázquez and Bernini, to the Post-Impressionist Cézanne, to Giacometti and Magritte, and to American post-war art.
Together with artists such as Julian Schnabel, Jeff Koons, and Martin Kippenberger, Salle shaped the aesthetics of artistic postmodernism that revolves around the principles of plurality, chance, citation usage, and irony in the sense of the End of the Grand Narratives (Jean-Francois Lyotard).
In the nineties, Salle started creating his Tapestry Paintings that were influenced by Italian and Russian tapestries of the seventeenth century. Unlike his earlier works that were often diptychs or triptychs, they consist of a single main picture into which smaller pictures are strategically implanted to disrupt the original composition. Over the course of time, these elements have taken on oval and arch-like shapes. Sculptural elements also appear in his works and enter into a connection with the canvas in the sense of Rauschenberg's Combine Paintings.
In 2004, the Vortex element was added to Salle's artistic syntax. It became the dominating element in his paintings, as shown in our cycle that stretches over eight canvases. In most cases, Salle places these maelstroms that call to mind the anamorphotic experiments of the Surrealists in the centre of the canvas: they seem to draw the depicted fresco-like nudes, tapestry-design shells, female portraits, Manga figures, and African sculptures into oblivion. The extraordinary precision of Salle's paintings is breathtaking. The distortion of the motifs is a testimony to his excellent command of modern graphics software. The synthesis of two-dimensional Pop Art, Surrealism, contemporary computer aesthetics, and old-masterly perfection gives the block of works presented here a unique character.
David Salle was born in 1952 in Norman (Oklahoma) and studied at the California Institute of the Arts in the seventies under the tutelage of John Baldessari. Over the course of the eighties, Salle quickly became the protagonist of the figurative painting scene in New York. Since then, his works have been presented in many international solo exhibitions, for instance at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, the MUMOK Vienna, the Castello di Rivoli Turin, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, the Whitney Museum of American Art New York, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles. His works are included in renowned collections such as that of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Essl Collection Vienna, the Guggenheim Museum New York, the Ludwig Museum Cologne, the Nationalgalerie Berlin, etc. David Salle lives and works in New York City and Sagaponack (Long Island).
