David Salle (*1952) is one of the leading postmodern painters of the last fifty years. Frequently associated with the Pictures Generation, Salle rose to international prominence in the 1980s as part of a generation of artists whose work critically explored the circulation and power of images. Like many of his contemporaries, Salle employed appropriative strategies in reworking mass media imagery, engaging with questions of originality and authoriality that resonated with postwar critical discourse, as expressed in Roland Barthes’ influential 1967 essay “The Death of the Author.” Yet, Salle is foremost a painter, and his engagement with appropriation and authorship is distinctively grounded in the canon of painting.
David Salle, Workplace, 2025–26 (detail)
© David Salle / ARS, New York 2026. Photo: John Berens
© David Salle / ARS, New York 2026. Photo: John Berens
David Salle
Painting in the Present Tense
Palazzo Cini Gallery, Venice
Through September 27, 2026
For his exhibition at the Palazzo Cini Gallery, David Salle refocuses a custom-designed AI model on an earlier part of his œuvre, the Tapestry Paintings (1990–91). In doing so, he highlights painting’s ability to collapse multiple temporal realities onto a single plane: “Everything in painting exists in the present tense,” as he says. The original Tapestry Paintings were based on 18th-century Russian tapestries, which were themselves modeled after 16th- and 17th-century Italian paintings. This layering of art history now comes into contact with Salle’s proprietary AI model. Organized around cubist-like grids informed by Salle’s signature inset panels – separate panels cut into and set flush with the surface of the painting, whose presentation of simultaneity has been seen to have anticipated the logic of computer screens – the painted tapestries become grounds over which the artist composes his distinctive poetic juxtapositions.
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