June 10 — July 15, 2022
Brussels
Artist David Salle always finds his way back to the fundamental building blocks of painting: line, shape, color, texture, and most importantly, composition. An imagist at heart, Salle has spent much of his career exploring how images can be constructed from those basic elements. His work demonstrates the essential, even inescapable reciprocity of image and pure painting. In his first exhibition with Gladstone, Salle presents a new series of paintings that each tell their own story through a pictorial language merged with the materiality – the facticity – of paint.
In the current body of work, Salle revisits his past to tell new stories. For this exhibition, the artist has repurposed previous works by enlarging, cropping, re-printing, and then painting over existing images to create brand new ones. This amalgamation of past, present, and future compounds the narrative potential of his figures, producing a complex yet legible mode of storytelling. Male and female figures, some nude and others clothed, a few with heads and many without, bisect the picture plane. Floating in space like flying maquettes, the bodies are tangled and overlaid by various motifs that Salle regularly employs in his work such as trees or ladders, or simple geometric forms. Indeed, the depiction of simplified forms as stand-ins for the human body, as 'bodies-in-the-making' is a leitmotif of these works. These forms take on various identities - sometimes a torso, other times a mattress, or a box, or a dented hourglass; the work seems to say, 'Look at what we are made of.'
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About
Photo by Robert Wright
David Salle (b. 1952, Norman, Oklahoma) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Salle attended the California Institute of Arts (CalArts), Los Angeles, receiving a BFA in 1973 followed by an MA in 1975. Since the 1980s, Salle has received international recognition, with solo exhibitions at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Spiral Hall Museum, Tokyo; Tel Aviv Museum of Art; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. His 1999 retrospective was held at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam and traveled to the Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna; Castello di Rivoli Museo d'Arte Contemporanea, Turin, Italy; and Guggenheim Bilbao, Spain. Salle’s most recent survey exhibition, was held at the Brant Foundation in Greenwich, Connecticut (2021). Salle’s work is held in international public collections including the Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois; The Broad, Los Angeles; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Dallas Museum of Art, Texas; Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), California; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humblebæk, Denmark; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, Australia; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; Tate Modern, London; Solomon R, Guggenheim Museum, New York; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others. Salle is also a prolific writer and critic whose essays and interviews have been published in Artforum, Art in America, Modern Painters, and The Paris Review, as well as in numerous exhibition catalogs and anthologies. He is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books and his collection of critical essays, How To See, was published by W. W. Norton in 2016.
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