The Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam presents from April 24-June 13, 1999 a major retrospective of works by the American artist David Salle. With more than fifty canvases the exhibition presents an overview of Salle’s artistic development.
Working in New York, David Salle made a name for himself in the 1980s with large colorful works in which he combines imagery and motifs from television and magazines in a confrontational way. The works are without exception “layered” and perhaps most comparable to flipping through channels on a television. After this presentation in Amsterdam, the exhibition will travel. Vienna, Turin and Bilbao.
David Salle once worked in the production department of a New York publisher of novels and pornographic magazines. Here he gathered a large amount of sentimental and software pornographic images. These samples formed an image bank for his later work. In addition to advertisement clips, movie stills, and quotes from artists such as Géricault and Courbet, he incorporates these media images to curious hushed two- or three parts. At the end of the decade, Salle one of the most recognized of the post-modernist painters. Along with contemporaries like Julian Schnabel (b. 1951) and Eric Fischl (b. 1948), he was a pioneer for New Image Painting in which figurative artists wished to break away from the Minimal and Concept Art.
The exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum is the first major presentation of early and recent work by David Salle. The artist previously presented a selection of his work at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam and recently bought the Stedelijk Museum Carnation (1994) at Salle.
This exhibition is sponsored by Freedom Netherlands.