David Salle

David Salle’s paintings are collisions of imagery. Scenes from Renaissance tapestries are overlaid with sleek mid-century design objects. Grisaille nudes clash with elements lifted from cartoons, magazines and advertisements. Composed without obvious rhyme or reason, the juxtapositions are surreal and visually thrilling.

Salle was born in Oklahoma in 1952 and raised in Wichita, Kansas. From 1973 to 1975, he studied at California Institute of the Arts under the pioneering Conceptual artist John Baldessari. Baldessari’s collage-like combinations of found images and text would have a great impact on his practice.

In 1976, Salle moved to New York. He found work at a publisher and began to collect and overlay pictures from magazines in its archives. This tactic laid the foundations for his mature style. Like the ‘Combines’ of Robert Rauschenberg, his pictures brought together material from ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture onto a single plane.

Salle became one of the most famous figures in New York’s vibrant 1980s art scene. His work sat somewhere between the era’s two key tendencies: the postmodern ‘Appropriation Art’ of the Pictures Generation, and the large-scale Neo-Expressionism of painters such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Julian Schnabel and Francesco Clemente.

Salle’s paintings are formally inventive. Many include inset canvas panels, or consist of two canvases joined together. Their effect has been compared to cinematic montage. Salle has a strong interest in film, as well as theatre and dance. He has made set designs and costumes for the American Ballet and frequently collaborated with the choreographer Karole Armitage, who was his partner for seven years.

His works might also be seen in musical terms. They are orchestrated with an improvisatory feeling for the timbre, rhythm and tone of images. Mingus in Mexico, a painting from 1990, set an auction record when it sold for £608,750 at Christie’s London in 2017. Its title refers to a painting of jazz legend Charles Mingus by the musician and painter Joni Mitchell, whose former studio Salle was working in at the time.

Without clues to their components’ original context, or any overarching narrative, Salle’s paintings are not meant to be decoded. He suggests enjoying their overall structure, rather than pulling them apart. ‘I feel that the only thing that really matters in art and in life is to go against the tidal wave of literalism and literal-mindedness — to insist on and live the life of the imagination’, he says. ‘A painting has to be the experience, instead of pointing to it.’