“Kasper [König] had installed a pretty large room with paintings from the late ‘30s and ‘40s, as well as a few from the ‘50s, mostly the so-called kitsch paintings: nudes with dogs, nudes with eroticized flowers, bullfighters, mythological-looking animals, which were all but unknown at the time. They had simply never been seen by artists of my generation, nor, I got the feeling, by anyone else. I was very taken by these paintings; I felt an immediate connection to the sensibility.
Something about the style—so lurid and melodramatic and full of unlikely juxtapositions, not to mention the somewhat ham-handed way of painting, with its chiseled brushstrokes alternating with little curlicues, and the unabashedly eroticized magazine imagery presented front and center—all struck a chord in me. I had never before seen painting as untethered to notions of taste, or even intention; there was no way of knowing how to take them, even whether to take them seriously at all. The work was so un-defended—it was like a delirious free-fall. The freedom in those pictures buoyed me up. It was an exhilarating feeling.” - David Salle
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David Salle, Age of Anxiety, 2012. Private Collection, Artwork © David Salle/VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY
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