In 1970, Salle entered the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, north of Los Angeles. There, he studied under John Baldessari, whose paintings often dealt with altered photographic imagery.
In 1970, Salle entered the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, north of Los Angeles. There, he studied under John Baldessari, whose paintings often dealt with altered photographic imagery.
David Salle is an American painter who, together with such contemporaries as Julian Schnabel and Robert Longo, regenerated big, gestural, expressionist painting after years of pared-down minimalism and conceptual art. Salle is known for mixing modes of representation and appropriated ready-made motifs in a single canvas, suggesting but defying any legible narrative.
Background
David Salle was born in Oklahoma but spent his formative youth in Wichita, Kansas. His parents, Alvin S. and Tillie Dean (Brown) Salle, were working class people of Russian Jewish heritage; Salle was among the second generation of his family to be born in America.
Education
As a young boy, David Salle took life-drawing classes through a local art organization in Wichita. His interest in drawing and painting persisted throughout his adolescence, and he continued to take classes several days a week as a high school student. In 1970, Salle entered the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, north of Los Angeles. There, he studied under John Baldessari, whose paintings often dealt with altered photographic imagery. The friendship between the two men has lasted over 40 years. While a student at California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, Salle explored various mediums, including video, installation art, and conceptual pieces. He also focused on abstract painting. He earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1973 and stayed at California Institute of the Arts in Valencia for graduate study, earning his Master of Fine Arts two years later.
Salle then left Southern California for New York, where he supported himself with a number of part-time jobs throughout the late 1970s. He taught art classes, worked in restaurants, and worked for the designer and installation artist Vito Acconci. One of his more unusual gigs consisted of doing page layout and paste-ups for a pornographic magazine. When the publication went out of business, Salle took some of the stock photographs to use for his own work. These included sexually explicit nude images, as well as generic 'news' materials.
In 1980, Salle was living and working in a converted loft space in the city's Tribeca neighborhood when he began to find success as an artist. Following his first solo show in New York City, he formed his association with noted gallery owner Mary Boone, who continues to represent him today.
During this time, the painter expanded his practice to include theatrical design. He designed the set and costumes for Kathy Acker's “The Birth of the Poet”, and went on to design staging and costumes for productions by the dancer and choreographer Karole Armitage. The internationally renowned dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov asked Armitage to create a new work for the American Ballet Theater; Armitage then approached Salle with the project. The collaboration was a fruitful one: the ballet was a success, and Salle and Armitage became lovers, living together for seven years. He met with a tremendous amount of success as an artist during the early 80s, and though his popularity slipped somewhat during the 1990s, he earned a very comfortable living as an artist.
Salle continued to challenge his creativity through the exploration of different art forms. During the 1990s, he began producing sculptures, and also started exhibiting his photography. Many black-and-white images became the basis for his painted canvases. Salle made his Hollywood directorial debut in 1995 with “Search and Destroy”, an adaptation of Howard Korder's stage play about a washed-up, middle-aged businessman who wants to adapt a self-help book into a movie. Though the film attracted some major Hollywood names including actors Christopher Walken, Dennis Hopper, and Ethan Hawke, with Martin Scorsese as producer - the film met with a mixed reception.
Salle eventually moved out of Tribeca to Long Island. He now lives and works in the coastal town of East Hampton, New York. Over the years, he has become a prolific writer on art, contributing to Artforum, The Paris Review, Town and Country, Interview, and a number of other publications. He has given a number of interviews in art publications as well as mainstream glossies such as Vanity Fair and Architectural Digest, and while he is candid about his philosophy of life and his creative process, he consistently reveals very little about his personal life, friends, or family.
From 2004 onward, Salle has experimented repeatedly with the vortex motif, mixing representational images with what has typically been an abstract and cartoonish form. One of his more recent series, “Late Product Paintings”, revisits his “Early Product Paintings” series of 1993, in which collaged renditions of product advertisements provides the basis for an exploration of the complex relationships between image, subject, and object. Though his romance with Armitage did not last, the two remain close friends and resumed their collaboration on her dance productions in the mid-2000s.
Like Robert Rauschenberg before him, Salle denies any hierarchy of subject matter by including both “high” and “low” imagery in a single canvas: famous art masterpieces with cartoon figures, high-end designed objects with pornographic imagery, and ornamental motifs with reproductions of newspaper photos, for example. In addition to mixing high and low imagery, Salle also mixes differing styles, including contour line drawings, modeled motifs, found objects, grisaille, crudely rendered images, and highly polished forms. Although he denied any iconographic intent in his pictures, his consistent use of aggressively posed nude women has elicited much response from feminists and others who object to the voyeuristic nature of his work.
For Salle, the process of collage was not limited to the usual juxtaposition of manifold cultural references or innocuous Pop. He also considered the combination of various painting styles from historical to photorealistic to cartoonish on the same plane as essential ingredients in his constructions as well as the use of various fabrics and opposing textures. Even differences between the black and white scale and color fields offered parallels in his work. Salle coined this element a "Vortex," a visual maelstrom left open to one's individual interpretation.
In much of Salle's work, familiar images are shown upside down or skewed from an average relativity. His use of body parts, floating by themselves in planes of blank space are a prime example of this desire to strip literalness from his subjects and instead present them, much like dancers upon the stage, as form rather than human. By placing common objects in these different perspectives, he asks us to process information in a new way, considering items for their shape or placement, jarring our associations from what is normal to what might be seen anew.
Quotations:
“When I came to New York in the 70s, it was common not to expect to be able to live from your art. I had very little idea about galleries or the business side of the art world. It all seemed pretty distant. When people started paying attention to my work, it seemed so unlikely that somehow it wasn't so remarkable. I made my work for a small audience of friends, other artists mostly, and that has not really changed. At the same time, having shows is a way of seeing if the work resonates with anyone else. Having that response, something coming back to you from the way the work is received in the world, can be important for your development as an artist. But you have to take it with healthy skepticism... I still spend most days in my studio, alone, and whatever happens flows from that.”
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
Salle has an uncanny ability to understand the requirement of a huge range of media from stage to film and even dance costumes - which have very specific technical limitations. I don't understand how he is so facile and intuitive while also keenly analytical.
Connections
David is a longtime collaborator and partner with the choreographer Karole Armitage as he designs sets and costumes for many of her ballets.