David Salle - Contemporary Art Part I New York Thursday, May 17, 2007 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Gagosian Gallery, New York

  • Exhibited

    Donaueschingen. Fürstenberg Sammlungen, ahead of the 21st century-- The Pisces Collection, June, 2002 – October, 2004

  • Literature

    T. Collins and R. Milazzo, David Salle: Unsere Subjektivitat, Germany, 1986, n.p. (illustrated)

  • Catalogue Essay

    “Although it might first appear that Salle’s images are totally disconnected, selected almost by chance from the infinite examples of high and low art, interior decoration, photography and commercial illustration that glut our image-banks, the accumulation by now of a substantial body of his work has begun to define coherent principles of choice, as if we had got to know through the medium of stream-of-consciousness the unique contours of an artist’s public and private personality. A consistent attraction to images, textures, materials that seem removed by one or two degrees from any absolute reality informs his work. The colors, usually applied as tints over broad geometric divisions, belong to a new chemical and electronic world of flatly luminous, synthetic hues, totally remote from nature, as if Brice Marden’s lovingly worked rectangles of precious pigments had been translated into the language of TV reception; the figural drawing, too, looks as if it had been copied unfeelingly from a pre-existing photograph of film frame; the fabrics and decorative patterns look like debased machine-made reproductions of lost originals; and even the occasionally painterly touch, in the ragged outlines of abstract or figurative shapes, betrays a facture no less mechanical than the collage elements.

    In all of this, Salle may well belong to what is commonly categorized these days as a Post-Modernist aesthetic, in which an earlier 20th-century struggle for an original style, for authentic, first-hand feeling had been abandoned in favor or a detached awareness of the widest range of visual specters that have come to haunt us from places as disparate as the sanctuaries of the Museum of Modern Art and the lurid illustrations of pulp fiction. Original, singular images and emotions have become, ironically, abstractions, whereas their multiple facsimiles have become our realities. By accepting this jungle of surrogate experience, Salle not only mirrors the new facts of life that surround us, but can transform them into a new art of shadow-boxing images that we recognize both as property common to us all and as an achievement uniquely his.” (R. Rosenblum, New York, 1984, taken from The Fruitmarket Gallery, ed., David Salle, London, 1987, pp. 11-12).

56

To Count Steps With

1982
Acrylic on canvas and masonite in two parts.
Overall 86 x 112 in. (218.4 x 284.5 cm).

Estimate
$100,000 - 150,000 

Sold for $192,000

Contemporary Art Part I

17 May 2007
7pm New York