DAVID SALLE (B. 1952)

‘For me, art history is like a feather bed’, says David Salle – ‘you fall into it and it catches you’ (D. Salle, ‘John Baldessari’, Interview Magazine, 9 October 2013). Having started his career during the heyday of New York’s ‘Pictures Generation’, he views the art of the past with an appropriator’s eye. Throughout his practice, references to the work of his forebears are drawn into discordant alliance with imagery culled from advertising, magazines and his own imagination. In his vast, symphonic canvases, he adheres to a warped pictorial logic, layering seemingly unrelated motifs and delighting in the occasional synchronicity between them. Flashes of Old Master paintings join hands with cartoon characters; Renaissance sculptures collide with obscure photographs and pictures from home décor magazines. For Salle, art history is simply one resource among many: less a wellspring of technical and stylistic inspiration than a catalogue of images to be plucked at will. The resulting works harbour a dreamlike sense of déjà-vu, reflecting the noisy dynamics of today’s image-saturated culture.

Executed in 1998, and included in Salle’s retrospective at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam the following year, Angels in the Rain is a fascinating example of his dialogue with the past. Composed like a comic book strip or a set of film stills, the work features two angelic statues – based on maquettes for Bernini’s angels on the Ponte Sant’Angelo in Rome – a tangle of abstract lines and three surreal bears on bicycles taken from a book of photographs of the Moscow Circus that Salle owned as a child. In the centre of the lower panel is a collection of vanitas motifs, including a skull, a candle, a dead fish and fruit. Salle’s reference to the still-life genre here is particularly intriguing. On one hand, his practice rejects the type of symbolism traditionally associated with memento mori, where static objects functioned as metaphors for the human condition. On the other hand, vanitas compositions – much like his own creations – were fundamentally exercises in assemblage, drawing together disparate objects to create a snapshot of the wider world. Just as Salle frequently sparks conversations between unrelated images in his work, here he invites parallels with a seemingly alien mode of picture-making, subtly historicising his own practice in the process.