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David Salle (born 1952) is an American painter, printmaker, photographer, and stage designer. Salle was born in Norman, Oklahoma and now lives and works in Sagaponack, New York. He earned a BFA and MFA from the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, California where he studied with John Baldessari. Salle’s work first came to public attention in New York in the early 1980s.

Biography
David Salle was born to Russian Jewish 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. When he graduated high school, he attended university in Valencia, CA, at the California Institute of the Arts. There, Salle trained and studied under John Baldessari, who he credits as the one responsible for showing him a path to his artistry. Salle earned his BFA in three years, then received his MFA in two.

After graduating from university, Salle relocated to New York, where he worked with Vito Acconci, however it wasn't until the 1980's that his career as an artist began to take off. 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 on by the American Ballet Theater to design set and costumes. Through working with dancer and choreographer Karole Armitage, the ballet was a success and Salle and Armitage fell in love. Although they eventually broke up, they continued to work together as friends.

In 1995, Salle made his Hollywood directorial debut with Search and Destroy, starring Christopher Walken and Ethan Hawke, and produced by Martin Scorsese. The film was met with mixed reactions, but that didn't stop Salle from living comfortably as an artist well into the present day. He currently lives in East Hampton, New York.

Art Works
His paintings and prints comprise 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. Some common imagery he would utilize would be items from popular culture, such as Donald Duck, or pieces from art history, such as parts from a Caravaggio painting. At a 2005 lecture, Salle stated:


 * 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.

Salle worked with different media and processes. Many of his works consisted of juxtaposed images where he took abstraction and the human figure to make reflections of survival. He manipulated 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, the Kestnergesellschaft Museum in Hannover, Germany, and more. Salle's work was also featured in an exhibition titled, The Pictures Generation, curated by Douglas Eklund at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York [1]. His work was shown amongst a number of other contemporary artists including Richard Prince, Sherrie Levine, Cindy Sherman, Nancy Dwyer [2], Robert Longo, Thomas Lawson, Charles Clough and Michael Zwack.

Salle's process typically starts with photographs he takes for references, 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. In fact, 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 in and of itself, Salle stated that he would paint his final images because it took images from the real world and placed them in the world and context of painting. In relation to his photographs as an artistic method, Salle explains that:


 * I don't have working drawings or maquettes. I start with one image, typically a photograph of the model I have been working with for ten years.  I take pictures of her doing different things--usually in a strong, theatrical light.  I never know what's going to come out of these pictures, if anything.  Later I have the photographs and decide if one could be a painting.  That's how it starts.  The one image necessitates a second and the two together need a third..."

According to Salle, his intention was to eliminate any narrative from the works, though one might attempt to decipher a story from the imagery. His decision-making process would begin with one image he would be attracted to, and he would continue to add pieces from specific images he acquired until the painting feels complete to him. However, an important distinction to make is that though Salle's works do not contain a narrative, his works do not lack in meaning or relation. He states that his choices in images is far from random, and that the pieces he chooses are cross-referenced with one another. In other words, Salle makes complex decisions about the fragments and imagery he chooses to combine. He states that he believes this to be his form of originality in pieces that he appropriates.

Salle also turned to set and costume design and directing mainstream cinema. In 1986, Salle received a Guggenheim Fellowship for theater design, and directed the feature film Search and Destroy. He is a longtime collaborator with the choreographer Karole Armitage, designing sets and costumes for her ballets.

Written Works
He is also a prolific writer on art. His essays and reviews have appeared in Artforum, Art in America, Modern Painters, The Paris Review, Interview, and numerous exhibition catalogs and anthologies. He was a regular contributor to Town & Country Magazine. His collection of critical essays, How to See, was published by W.W. Norton in 2016. Salle works closely with fellow influential contemporary artists of the twentieth century such as, Jeff Koons, Roy Lichtenstein, and John Baldessari when creating this extensive collection of essays. Salle writes with wit and humor, replacing the jargon of art theory with simplified descriptions in order for the reader to develop a deeper connection and understanding of the work that they are viewing. The result: a master class on how to see with an artist’s eye. According to The New York Times, Dwight Garner, "Mr. Salle’s mission in “How to See” is to seize art back from the sort of critics who treat each painting “as a position paper, with the artist cast as a kind of philosopher manqué.” Mr. Salle is more interested in talking about nuts and bolts, about what makes contemporary paintings tick." Salle's writing is much like his Controversial rt style, witty and intriguing. He believes that all of the jargon that is associated with art history can and should be simplified so that those who are interested, but lack the Fine Art schooling can still learn about and appreciate artwork.

Criticisms & Praise
Though Salle insisted that his works were not a random assortment of images layered onto one another, critics were difficult to convince. Some common critiques from the time included that his paintings were completely incoherent and that the images he chose were arbitrary and unrelated to one another. Arthur Danto, a well-known art critic and philosopher, stated that Salle's paintings conveyed a "sense of purposiveness with no specific purpose." However, the critic Robert Storr, as well as a myriad of postmodern authors, was fascinating because of its visually "graphic double-exposure" and "kaleidoscopic effect," as well as its infinite meanings and interpretations by viewers.

Another point of contention for critics was Salle's common use of pornographic images of women, in which critics found it to be a form of voyeurism or downright provocation, particularly to the feminist movement. For example, Mira Schor, a feminist artist and writer, felt that his portrayals of women seem "to be a continuation of a male conversation which is centuries old, to which women are irrelevant except as depersonalized projections of man's fears and fantasies." However, Salle, as well as a number of critics, found that the images, though sexually explicit, were not "particularly erotic" because of the faded and blurred effect on the figures, which distances the portrayal from reality.

In response, and justification, to his own works, Salle stated that:


 * I think we are getting to a point in the culture where the notion that something happened that wasn't supposed to happen--the notion of humor or the absurd, the unexpected, the irrational--that these notions of how to see one's life, and how to be involved with one's own life, conjoin to make a sensibility which is more accepting than the sensibility of previous generations. I'm thinking of an art that functions as an accidental trigger rather than a logical one.  And that does have to do probably with certain things everyone has pointed out, like media glut, things like that.  Like, ho ho, maybe we really are morally bankrupt.  And maybe it's fun.

Collections
Salle's work can be found in the permanent collections of numerous art museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA); Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Tate Modern, London; and the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, among others.