Artist to Know: David Salle

While working in the art department of a publisher of romance and pornographic magazines David Salle gathered together photographs from the company’s archives, later using them as source material for his paintings. After producing performances and installations in the late 1970s he began in 1979 to make paintings in which he overlaid images in different styles based on found sources, as in The Flesh Made Word (1979; Rotterdam, Boymans–van Beuningen). During the 1980s and early 1990s he was one of the most influential young painters working in a representational idiom. Salle also turned his hand to set and costume design, and to directing mainstream cinema. In 1986 Salle received a Guggenheim fellowship for theater design, and in 1995 he directed the feature film, Search and Destroy, starring Griffin Dunne and Christopher Walken. He is a long time collaborator with the choreographer Karole Armitage as he designs sets and costumes for many of her ballets. Salle currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.