American postmodern artist David Salle's five-decade long career has drawn inspiration from everyday imagery, media and art history, creating a massive oeuvre that traverses painting, fashion and film.
Read MoreDavid Salle was born in 1952 in Oklahoma, USA. He received his BFA at the California Institute of the Arts in 1973, studying under the tutelage of American artist John Baldessari. Two years later, Salle completed his MFA in the same school.
Salle's oeuvre is characterised by a distinct style that creates parallels between pop culture, advertising, graffiti and art history through punchy paintings brimming with colour, graphic lines and cartoonish illustration.
Salle came to prominence in the New York art scene during the late 1970s and early 1980s at a time when painting was considered to be out of fashion. His work has been written about in association with the Pictures Generation, a group of American artists in the 70s that critically analysed and examined media culture through their work.
Salle's earlier works have been viewed as being irreverent, spooky and eerie. His painting Fooling With Your Hair (1985) divides the canvas into several panels. The bottom three panels feature a woman laid down on a table in provocative positions, naked from the waist down, save for a pair of shoes. The upper panels are illustrated with mid-century light fixtures and Alberto Giacometti sculptures. This arrangement is similarly seen in Sextant in Dogtown (1987) where the bottom panels depict a woman in movement, reminiscent of boudoir photographs, paired with uncanny illustration of clown figurines and a figure operating a sextant navigation instrument.
Taking cues from a variety of imagery such as magazines, pornography, films and photographs, Salle's juxtaposition of images has been likened to collage. The viewer is left to make their own associations based around the proximity of the figures featured.
Salle has also worked across theatre, dance and film productions as a costume and set designer. He designed the costumes of several ballet and opera performances in the 80s, collaborating closely with avant-garde choreographer and dancer Karole Armitage.
He references this period of his practice in many of his paintings, especially through his 'Ballet Paintings' series (1992—93), where he attempted to consolidate all his knowledge on ballet and performance through painting. One of the paintings in this series, False Queen (1992) uses an amalgamation of imagery, including a musical score with a ballerina in the background. Comedy (1995) subtly integrates his career as a costume designer, with one of its panels featuring a harlequin costume he had designed previously.
In 1995, Salle released his film Search and Destroy, produced by Martin Scorsese and featuring Ethan Hawke and Christopher Walken. Like his involvement with dance and theatre, the influence of film and set design has been portrayed in many of Salle's paintings. Final Cut (1993), for instance, uses the visual language of filmmaking, as if the painting is spliced into two frames.
David Salle has been widely exhibited internationally. He has held solo exhibitions at the Stedelijk Museum; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey, Mexico; Dallas Contemporary, among many others. His work has been included in major group exhibitions at institutions such as the Whitney Museum of American Art; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; MoMA PS1; Centre Georges Pompidou; Sydney Biennial; and the Venice Biennale.
David Salle's website can be found here while his Instagram can be found here.
Arianna Mercado | Ocula | 2023
