Untitled (Dark Red)

Description

“Because painting is so charged, so weighted down by history, so lumbering, so bourgeois, so spiritual—all these things that had made it seem so incorrect—I came to see this is what gave painting such potential.” 
David Salle played a major role in the resurgence of large-scale figurative painting in the early 1980s, and his work—filled with art-historical references and ambiguous juxtapositions of both original and appropriated imagery—helped define the terms of what came to be known as postmodern painting. In this early work, Salle brings together such diverse painterly vocabularies as Color Field, Pop, and the noir-tinged realism of Edward Hopper. Approached with an air of clinical detachment, individual images, styles, and movements emerge as so many positions to be occupied, emptied of their historical specificity. Relationships are implied but narrative is subverted through abrupt changes in scale and a flattened out, depthless pictorial space. And while Salle’s renderings are notable for their graphic clarity, the painting’s refusal to describe a coherent internal space mirrors the channel-surfing media environment that has come to dominate contemporary life.
Jacob Proctor, Associate Curator of Modern & Contemporary Art
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6/28/10
David Salle (United States, born 1952)
Untitled (Dark Red)
1978
Acrylic, graphite, charcoal, and diamond dust on canvas
Gift of the Lannan Foundation in Honor of the Pelham Family
“Because painting is so charged, so weighted down by history, so lumbering, so bourgeois, so spiritual—all these things that had made it seem so incorrect—I came to see this is what gave painting such potential.” 
?David Salle
David Salle played a major role in the resurgence of large-scale figurative painting in the early 1980s, and his work—filled with art-historical references and ambiguous juxtapositions of both original and appropriated imagery—helped define the terms of what came to be known as postmodern painting. In this early work, Salle brings together such diverse painterly vocabularies as Color Field, Pop, and the noir-tinged realism of Edward Hopper. Approached with an air of clinical detachment, individual images, styles, and movements emerge as so many positions to be occupied, emptied of their historical specificity. Relationships are implied but narrative is subverted through abrupt changes in scale and a flattened out, depthless pictorial space. And while Salle’s renderings are notable for their graphic clarity, the painting’s refusal to describe a coherent internal space mirrors the channel-surfing media environment that has come to dominate contemporary life.