Abandoned Shells

Material

Oil, acrylic and cloth on canvas; 396.0 x 190.0 cm

Dating

1984

About the artist

David Salle studied under John Baldessari at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia. Together with Julian Schnabel and Ross Bleckner, he belongs to the most important artists of the US-American New Image Painting, which, since the late 1970s, stands for a spectacular Renaissance of figurative painting. In many ways New Image Painting is comparable to the Italian Transavanguardia and the German Neue Wilde movement. The late 1970s had a particular impact on Salle’s work as an artist. After a journey through Europe, his work became reminiscent of artists such as Jörg Immendorff, Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter, all of which had left a deep impression on Salle. From the mid-1980s onwards, he increasingly introduced references – images and quotations – to popular culture and art history into his large scale works.

The artist likes to experiment with multiple perceptions. He combines disparate scenes in a way that makes them appear as narrative milieus rather than stories with a simple narrative thread. At first glance his large scale paintings appear like a collection of references to art, design, advertising, and photography. Yet his motives elude reality despite their materiality, as they presuppose well-known sources that remain, however, hard to decipher. Salle uses also the effects of music, dance and film and their relationship to reality to structure his motives.

He was an early member of the “Pictures Generation,” whose work was revisited in an exhibition of the same title at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in 2009. Salle’s work can be found in the collections of many international museums, such as the Centre Georges Pompidou, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Stedelijk Museum, the Tate, the Walker Art Center, the Guggenheim Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, the latter of which in 1987, honored Salle, at age 34, with the youngest mid-career survey ever. Salle is also a prolific writer on art. “How to See,” a volume of his collected essays was published by W.W. Norton in 2016. His essays and reviews have been published in Artforum, T: The New York Times Style Magazine, Art in America, and The Paris Review. Salle was for some years the art critic for Town & Country, and is now a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books.