DAVID SALLE AT BRANT
Orchestral in Capturing Rhythms and Complexities
The Brant Foundation Art Study Center is presenting works by David Salle at its Greenwich, CT location. From November 16 until April 1, 2022, visitors will have the opportunity to view over 40 pieces from the American artist. They are from the Brants Collection and other international private collections, foundations, and museums.
The exhibition features significant paintings from different stages of the artist’s career of over 40 years. As the Brant Foundation puts it, the creations “evolved a tightly controlled visual syntax,” focusing on the countless connections between parts and how they form a whole. “Salle’s work is “orchestral” in nature and can be seen in the larger context of the early and mid-20th century high modernism, specifically in the language (visual or verbal) of poets, such as the Imagism of Ezra Pound, Hart Crane, and Laura Riding, and painters Pablo Picasso, Giorgio de Chirico, and Francis Picabia. They are all artists who sought to capture the rhythm and complexity of contemporary life through the use of “synecdoche, narrative compression, juxtaposition, and general resistance to closure.”
Salle was born in Oklahoma in 1952 and grew up in Cold War America. As a young boy, he would help his father with window displays and design ads for his store in the local newspaper. He also learned photography from his father and was skilled at a very young age. Salle has stated: “From an early age, I was involved in the language of moving rectangles around and creating an image supported by a type. That was the ad page. The other thing was directing models to make some idealized or arresting image, using light and shadow to create form. And then there was window display – a large illuminated rectangle, as a kind of stage. The idea was to create something that can be glimpsed in passing that also invites prolonged looking.”
At 17, he began studying at the California Institute of the Arts under John Baldessari and became one of the earliest names associated with Conceptual Art. He then moved to New York and, although he became a big name in the “Pictures Generation”, his work expanded beyond one style or movement. In his pieces, he asks the viewer to play a part in their construction and meaning. He chose painting and also brought the art of cinema into his work: “What Salle ultimately achieved, and what this exhibition demonstrates, was to join all these disparate influences and traditions together into a flexible, expansive painterly language.”
Many of his notable series are represented, including “Smoking Women,” the grisaille diptychs and triptychs of the 80s, the “Tapestry Paintings” of the late 80s and early 90s, the “Ballet Paintings” (1992), the “Early Product Paintings” and “Ghost Paintings” (1994), the Pastoral Paintings of the late 1990s and early 2000s, and the later “Tapestry and Battle Paintings” (2012-2013). Don’t miss this exhibition on view from November 16 until April 1, 2022.
