David Salle

11 Sep — 11 Oct 2003

Waddington Galleries will present an exhibition of twelve recent paintings by the American artist David Salle.

David Salle gained international recognition in the early 1980s as one of the most prominent artists of his generation to question the nature of originality and authenticity in a consumer driven and media-dominated culture. As Salle stated during that period, everything in this world is simultaneously itself and a representation of the idea of itself the pleasures and challenges of simultaneity continue to be one of the driving forces in my work.

In these recent paintings David Salle continues to use his device of pastiche making it both the form and content of his work. Many of the canvases are made up of several panels of seemingly random images painted in varying scale. The combining of pictorial fragments framed within rectangles and squares reflects the on-screen world of computers, movies and television.

Salle's disparate images are not only taken from the art of the past but from sources as various as movie stills, pornography, advertising from the fifties, and how to draw manuals. For instance, in Evaporation Machine, 2003, a cropped, partially clothed, female torso is set next to a detail of a Manet still life and, in the panel above, a grey windowless interior containing thistle-like flowers. The same image of the anonymous woman also appears in Passers- by, 2002, adjacent to a quizzical looking business man. Hovering over them, against a swirling patterned background, are three giant white orchids placed beside a Degas bronze.

The pictorial elements are not governed by a narrative structure so each painting has an arbitrary quality. This denial of a visual hierarchy means that each image is treated in the same neutral way whether it is a portrait of a woman, a man's hat or a daffodil. Salle's approach to such images comments upon the relentless visual bombardment of mass-media representation. As Robert Rosenblum has written in his introduction to these works, Salle seems to be inventing a new system of grammar to fit his new vocabularies, creating unexpected systems of meaning that we cannot decode in words, but that we intuit as fitting together like the solution to a puzzle.

Salle was born in Oklahoma in 1952. He trained at the California Institute of Arts, Valencia, California and was awarded a BFA in 1973 followed by an MFA in 1975. In the same year he moved to New York and began working for a magazine company. Salle had his first solo exhibition at the Artists Space, New York in 1976 and has exhibited at museums and galleries internationally ever since. In 1999 he had a major retrospective at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam that travelled to the Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna, Museo d�Arte Contemporanea Castella di Rivoli, Turin and the Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao. In the following year he had a retrospective at the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Monterrey, Mexico. Salle's work is included in many public collections worldwide including MOMA, New York, Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, New York, Sintra Museum, Portugal and Tate, London. As well from his paintings, photographs and prints, David Salle has designed costumes and sets for various theatre productions and has also directed a film (produced by Martin Scorsese) titled 'Search and Destroy'. The artist lives and works in Sagaponack, Long Island, New York.