David Salle: 'The machine has no taste' How the artist is disrupting art history with AI at the 2026 Venice Biennale

By Zabrina Lo

Venice is a city built on the weight of its past, with major museums, historic residences-turned-galleries, and grand hotels retaining Renaissance frescoes and Old Master paintings that define its art history. Yet inside Galleria Palazzo Cini—the former residence of 20th-century politician Vittorio Cini, which now houses a rich collection of 13th- to 18th-century Italian art—American painter David Salle is staging a high-tech disruption.

For his Venetian solo debut, Painting in the Present Tense, curated by Luca Massimo Barbero and supported by Thaddaeus Ropac gallery, Salle pits traditional painting against artificial intelligence (AI). As one of the pioneers of the Pictures Generation—a term given to an artist group emerging in late-1970s and early-1980s New York, known for its critical analysis of media culture—Salle uses custom algorithms to scramble his own legacy right in the heart of Venice.

Setting generative technology against Venice’s historic backdrop creates a striking contrast. But for Salle, history on canvas is never static. “Present tense simply means that we look at paintings with today’s eyes,” he says. “As art history, Venice is a layer cake—everything overlaps everything else. The past gives ballast to the present, and continuity is all.”

To achieve this temporal collapse, Salle trained a custom AI model on his Tapestry Paintings (1989–91)—works originally based on 18th-century Russian tapestries that reinterpreted 16th-century Italian oils. By filtering them through AI, Salle added another iteration to a centuries-old visual game of telephone. “I knew there was more to be wrung out of the Tapestries. Then the machine came along and made it fast,” says Salle.