David Salle

David Salle (born September 28, 1952; last name pronounced "Sally") is an American Postmodern painter, printmaker, photographer, and stage designer.

Salle was born in Norman, Oklahoma, and lives and works in East Hampton, New York.

He earned a BFA and MFA from the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, California, where he studied with John Baldessari.

David Salle was born to Russian Jewish immigrant parents on September 28, 1952, in Norman, Oklahoma, but grew up in Wichita, Kansas.

He developed an interest in art at a very young age, spending his childhood and teenage years in art classes provided by a local art organization.

At the age of eight or nine, he began taking life-drawing classes at the Wichita Art Association.

During high school, he attended outside art classes three days a week.

After graduating from high school, Salle attended the California Institute of the Arts.

There he trained and studied under John Baldessari, whom he credits for showing him a path to his artistry.

Salle earned his BFA in three years, then received his MFA in two.

After graduating, Salle relocated to New York, where he worked with Vito Acconci.

During this time, he established a working partnership with Mary Boone, a renowned gallery owner, and still works with her to this day.

Around the same time, Salle was hired by the American Ballet Theatre to design set and costumes.

His work with dancer and choreographer Karole Armitage made the ballet a success, and Salle and Armitage fell in love.

They eventually broke up, but continued to work together as friends.

Salle’s work first came to public attention in New York City in the early 1980s.

In 1986 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship for Theater Design, and directed the feature film Search and Destroy.

In 1995, Salle made his Hollywood directorial debut with Search and Destroy, starring Christopher Walken and Griffin Dunne and produced by Martin Scorsese.

The film met with mixed reactions.

Salle now lives in East Hampton, New York.

Salle's paintings and prints consist of what appear to be randomly juxtaposed and multilayered images, or images placed on top of one other with deliberately illogical techniques, in which he combines original and appropriated imagery.

Imagery he uses includes items from popular culture, such as Donald Duck, and pieces from art history, such as parts from a Caravaggio painting.

Salle has worked with different media and processes.

Many of his works consist of juxtaposed images, where he takes abstraction and the human figure.

He manipulates images by combining a variety of different styles, recognizable imagery, and textures.

Exhibitions of his work have taken place at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Castello di Rivoli (Torino, Italy), the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, and the Kestnergesellschaft Museum in Hannover, Germany.

Salle's work was also featured in The Pictures Generation, an exhibition curated by Douglas Eklund at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

His work was shown among a number of other contemporary artists including Richard Prince, Sherrie Levine, Cindy Sherman, Nancy Dwyer, Robert Longo, Thomas Lawson, Charles Clough, and Michael Zwack.

Salle's process typically starts with photographs he takes for reference, such as hired models.

This was both groundbreaking and controversial at the time, primarily because the combination of these two art forms was not common practice.

During this period, painters and photographers were often debating which form had more merit, or whether they had merit at all.

Though his collection of photographs is considered art itself, Salle has said he would paint his final images because it took images from the real world and placed them in the world and context of painting.

According to Salle, his intention was to eliminate any narrative from his work, though one might attempt to decipher a story from the imagery.

His decision-making process begins with one image he is attracted to, to which he continues to add pieces from specific images he acquired until the painting feels complete.

Though Salle's works do not contain a narrative, they do not lack meaning or relation.

He has said that his choices of image are far from random, and that the pieces he chooses are cross-referenced with one another in complex ways.

He believes this to be his form of originality in pieces that he appropriates.

During the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020-21, Salle has painted a series of works called Tree of Life which reference Adam and Eve, the Garden of Eden, and The New Yorker cartoonist Peter Arno (1904-1968).

The canvases alternate between a black and white and polychrome palette.

Salle has also done set and costume design and directed films.