Art History #4
David Salle
After producing performances and installations in the late 1970s, Salle began to make paintings in which he overlaid found images from different sources in varying styles. Based on models from art history, stock photography, advertisements, design, and everyday culture, Salle creates an assemblage with many different cultural reference. While working in the art department of a publisher of romance and magazines he gathered photographs from the company's archives, later using them as source material for his paintings. By juxtaposing seemingly unrelated images, Salle constructs original, complex, and fragmented narratives that deny any one interpretation. During the 1980s and early 1990s he was one of the most influential young painters engaged in a representational idiom and is recognized for his role in revitalizing representational art and for being one of the great artists working today.