Robert Longo

David Salle

Born: 28 Sept 1952

Birthplace: Norman, OK

Lives/works: NYC and Sagaponack, Long Island

Education: California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA; BFA (1973), MFA (1975)

Media: Draughtsman, painter, printmaker

David Salle is one of the most significant American artists to have become known in the early 1980s. He is published in ArtForum, Art in America, and has exhibited his work nationwide. His distinctive style of painting was influential in the international revival of large-scale, figurative painting that characterized much of the artistic production of the decade. While he attended the newly established California Institute of the Arts (in the 1970s), he began applying film techniques, such as montage and split screen, to painting. After finishing school, he moved to New York, where his complex, visually motivating imagery quickly attracted the attention of the 1980s international art audience. Salle, like many of his generation, took his inspiration from images in society. In appropriating scenes from art history, advertising, design, and popular culture, Salle creates compositions of mixed cultural references. Salle's paintings contain allusions to artworks by Baroque artists, the Post-Impressionist painter Cйzanne, the Surrealists, and the postwar American artist Jasper Johns. In addition to the fine arts, Salle also borrows from the photography and decorative arts. Many of his colorful paintings depict 3-dimensional scenes. Salle is good at working in series, sometimes more than one at a time. In the 1970s he began to make paintings in which he overlaid images in different styles based on found sources, transparencies, and juxtaposition of styles. In 1993, Salle created his Early Product Paintings, including Exit Laughing, which contains interwoven advertisements of liquor, household appliances, and cigarettes. At about the same time, Salle also developed a series of Ballet Paintings, whose backgrounds are based on 1950s photographs of Paris Ballet stars rehearsing. He completed two very different series in the same timeframe.

My Connection

The way David Salle overlaps and juxtaposes different image styles is something I would like to try in my own work.