{"data":{"id":"1149","type":"artist","attributes":{"id":1149,"topgoose_id":491,"tms_id":1149,"display_name":"David Salle","sort_name":"Salle David","display_date":"1952–","begin_date":"1952","end_date":"0","biography":"\u003cp\u003eDavid Salle’s paintings are inspired by a medley of popular and art-historical sources that he juxtaposes to startling, and often provocative, effect, in a manner evoking film montage. The rectangular compartments that subdivide \u003ca href=\"/collection/works/7217\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eSextant\nin Dogtown\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/a\u003e contain a pastiche of painterly styles and subjects. Jester-like characters are adjacent to scantily clad female figures; black-and-white panels counterpoise brightly colored ones. Confronted with disjunctive images and no evident narrative or overarching motif, we are left to forge connections and surmise meaning. For example, extracting the connection between a large bird and a half-dressed woman is rendered additionally complex for the viewer by the multiple vantage points available. Here, we are at once looking at the woman, are looked at by the clowns, and observe the cartographer in the upper right-hand corner looking. The act of seeing—or not seeing—is indeed thematized: in two frames, the woman’s head is truncated above the neck, while in a third it is cloaked.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eSalle’s work straddles two of the\nmost significant movements in American\nart of the late 1970s and 1980s—the\nresurgence of figurative painting, one\nshared with artists such as \u003ca href=\"/artists/434\"\u003eEric Fischl\u003c/a\u003e and\n\u003ca href=\"/artists/5279\"\u003eFrancesco Clemente\u003c/a\u003e, and the use of\nappropriated imagery by the group of artists\nreferred to as the Pictures Generation,\nincluding \u003ca href=\"/artists/2909\"\u003eCindy Sherman\u003c/a\u003e and \u003ca href=\"/artists/3382\"\u003eRichard Prince\u003c/a\u003e.\nSalle’s paintings, drawings, photographs,\nand films of the past three decades\nrepresent by turns an indictment and a\ncelebration of our fast-paced, consumerist,\nimage-saturated, postmodern age.\u003c/p\u003e","on_view":false,"artport":false,"biennial":true,"collection":true,"ulan_id":"500027321","wikidata_id":"Q2637678","created_at":"2017-08-30T15:42:00.000-04:00","updated_at":"2026-04-09T07:04:39.787-04:00","links":{"artworks":"/api/artists/1149/artworks","exhibitions":"/api/artists/1149/exhibitions"}}}}