David Salle

David Salle was born in 1952 in Norman, Oklahoma. He grew up in Wichita, Kansas and from 1973 to 1975 he attended the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), where he studied with John Baldessari. He is a neo-expressionist painter who gained prominence in the 1980s as a leader in the return to figuration. He is well known for his large-scale canvases featuring a sparse, seemingly disjunctive arrangement of elements, often including provocatively posed women, nudes and the use of grisaille. In 1976 he moved to New York City, where he found work in a publishing house specialized in romance and pornography magazines. Here he began to collect images from its archive. Salle saved a group of stock photographs depicting e.g. nudes, sporting events, airplane crashes, which he later used as source material for his paintings. His earliest work involved the strategy of overlaying images, and this quickly became his signature style. Salle, together with contemporaries as Julian Schnabel and Robert Longo, regenerated the gestural expressionist painting after years of pared-down minimalism and conceptual art. Solo exhibitions of his works have been held at museums and galleries worldwide, including the Witney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, the MoMA, Vienna, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art and the Castello di Rivoli. Salle now lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.