David Salle

David Salle is a renowned and widely acclaimed American artist and painter, associated with neo-expressionism and post-modernism, who has enjoyed a successful career for decades. His art combines an array of cultural elements including painting, photography, sculpture, and theater. Salle has been exhibited widely, including solo shows at the Guggenheim Museum and Minneapolis Institute of Art, as well as retrospective exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art and Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.

Born in Oklahoma, in 1954, Salle attended The Kansas City Art Institute before moving to New York City in 1976 to further pursue his art. During his early career, he found success quickly, and in the late 1970s he was included in important exhibitions such as the Whitney Biennial, New York/New Wave, and Pattern & Decoration.

Often working in a like manner to other leading Neo-Expressionists, Salle’s art typically includes a combination of disparate visual elements and visual sources arranged in a fragmented manner. Such eclectic combinations often feature dynamic compositions made up of text and abstracted figures, as well as displaced and disjointed flat-colors. This fragmentation of elements, found throughout Salle’s art, is reflective of his early experience as a stage designer, which is shown in both his theatrical handling of composition and his inclusion of text.

Such a combination of the visual and the verbal is also seen in Salle’s extensive publishing endeavours. He has worked as an editor for numerous magazines, and has written essays for several books, such as ‘In the Studio’ and ‘Forty Years of Seeing and Writing’. He has also co-authored a book with Michael Scott-Mann, ‘Things as They Are’, an assemblage of images, text and art, which define Salle’s intellectual interests, particularly his interest in theater, literature, and philosophy.

In addition to his painting and his editorial and writing career, Salle has also organized museum exhibitions and served as a teacher of painting, drawing and conceptual art classes at school such as Cal Arts, Princeton and the School of Visual Arts in New York.

At present, David Salle’s work can be found in major public collections such as the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum, as well as in private collections across the world. Such living proof of Salle’s status as one of the major figures of contemporary art serves to validate his extensive contributions to the art world and to literature.