David Salle David Salle

The Brant Foundation Art Study Center presents a survey of works by David Salle, in Greenwich, CT. Despite having numerous recent international exhibitions, this will be Salle’s first comprehensive survey in 20 years and will comprise over 40 works from the Brant Collections and loans from international private collections, foundations, and museums.

The artist's first NFT artwork 'A Well-Leafed Tree' is also included in the exhibition and available on SuperRare. 

Though Salle’s work is often characterized as an exemplary post-modern visual mashup, the artist’s visual language is far from random. Salle has evolved, over 40 years, a tightly controlled visual syntax. Just as in poetry, music, or any other syntactically organized language, what matters are the myriad relationships of the parts to the whole. Salle’s work is “orchestral” in nature, and can be seen in the larger context of early and mid-20th century high modernism, specifically in the language (visual or verbal) of poets, such as the Imagism of Ezra Pound, Hart Crane, and Laura Riding, and painters Pablo Picasso, Giorgio de Chirico, and Francis Picabia – all artists who sought to capture the rhythm and complexity of contemporary life through the use of synecdoche, narrative compression, juxtaposition, and a general resistance to closure. These disparate artists, among many others, believed in the essential malleability, or plasticity, of the work of art. They wanted an art with the present-tense experience of simultaneity, one that had the spontaneity of thought. As the critic Deborah Solomon wrote, “Salle’s paintings are often structured in musical fashion, with repetition and variation between parts and the creation of imagistic cords.”