David Salle, Untitled #2, #6

Why invest in David Salle?
David Salle is an American artist who was born in Norman, Oklahoma, in September 1952 and lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. He is recognized for his paintings and other works that juxtapose contrasting visual elements from popular culture. His creations often include allusions to Pop Art, imbued with a surrealistic vision.

Early Beginnings and Education
Salle came to art at a very young age. By the time he was eight years old, he was learning life drawing, and during high school, he regularly attended art classes. He later studied at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), earning a BFA in 1973 and an MFA in 1975, and trained under artists such as John Baldessari and Vito Acconci.

Rise to Prominence
The artist rose to prominence in the 1980s alongside a generation of painters like Julian Schnabel and Eric Fischl, who were working in a new expressionist mode. He is also associated with Pictures Generation artists such as Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger, and Richard Prince, who reimagined mass-media imagery and advertisements in their works. Salle's first major gallery exposure was with Mary Boone, the renowned talent discoverer, who first exhibited his work in 1981.

Representation and Recognition
Today, Salle is represented by prestigious international galleries: Gladstone Gallery in New York and Brussels Thaddaeus Ropac in Paris and London Max Hetzler in Berlin Lehmann Maupin in Asia Skarstedt, the blue-chip gallery that hosted seven solo shows by Salle over the past decade, will remain active in the secondary market, though the artist is now represented by Gladstone in New York.

Artistic Legacy
Salle's paintings have been shown in solo and group exhibitions and in major international exhibitions in museums and galleries worldwide for over forty years. His work can be found in the permanent collections of numerous prestigious institutions around the globe.

Selected Solo Exhibitions
Upcoming 2025: David Salle: Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris, France - April.
2024: David Salle: Gladstone Gallery, New York, USA - upcoming September.
2024: David Salle: Works on Paper, Edward Hopper House Museum & Study Center, Nyack, USA.
2023: David Salle: The Sporting Life, Dylan Brant Fine Art, Palm Beach, USA.
2023: David Salle: Tree of Life, This Time with Feeling, Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac-Marais, Paris, France.
2022: David Salle: Barbara Gladstone, Brussels, Belgium.

Selected Group Exhibitions
2023: About Art, Makasiini Contemporary, Logomo, Turkey.
2023: Mapping an Art World: Los Angeles in the 1970s-80s, Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles Grand Avenue, Los Angeles, USA.
2023: The Yellow Light at 6PM: Remembering, Envisioning, Sensing Landscape, Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin, Germany.
2023: Beautiful, Vivid, Self-contained, curated by David Salle, Hill Art Foundation, New York, USA.
2023: Wave Pattern, Dylan Brant and Max Werner, New York, USA.

Artistic Style and Philosophy
Salle is also a prolific writer and critic whose essays and interviews have been published in various prestigious publications. His work is known for its compression and concision, exploring image juxtapositions and pairings of scale, color, and touch. Salle's paintings often feature background details drawn from advertisements, magazine photos, and newspaper articles, inviting viewers to decipher their conceptual connections to the foreground imagery.

"In these paintings, I'm interested in compression and concision – the haiku rather than the ode. I'm working not just with image juxtapositions, but also with pairings of scale, color, touch and so forth. I want to see one thing through another; the so-called 'background' is really another character." - David Salle".