David Salle

 

Born 1952, Norman, Oklahoma; lives and works in Easthampton, NY.

 

Neo-expressionist painter David Salle gained prominence in the 1980s as a leader in the return to figuration, along with contemporaries Julian Schnabel, Francesco Clemente, Eric Fischl, and Jean-Michel Basquiat. He is well known for his large-scale canvases featuring a sparse, seemingly disjunctive arrangement of elements, often including provocatively posed women and nudes and the use of grisaille. Pairing Pop art's common imagery with Surrealism's private associations, Salle's collage-like paintings often gather widely different moods, styles, and sources within one work.

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Salle's work is held in the permanent collections of many museums including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the Tate Modern, London, to name a few.

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