David Salle

David Salle is an American painter who helped define the post-modern sensibility by combining figuration with an extremely varied pictorial language. His paintings comprise what appeared to be randomly juxtaposed images, or images painted on top of each other with deliberately ham-fisted paint handling.

Major exhibitions of his work have taken place at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, Castello di Rivoli (Torino, Italy), and the Guggenheim Bilbao. In March 2009 a group of fifteen paintings were shown at the Kestnergesellschaft Museum in Hannover, Germany. That same year Salle's work was also featured in an exhibition titled "The Pictures Generation" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, in which his work was shown amongst a number if his contemporaries.

Salle has also turned his hand to set and costume design, and to directing mainstream cinema. In 1986 Salle received a Guggenheim fellowship for theater design, and in 1995 he directed the feature film, Search and Destroy, starring Griffin Dunne and Christopher Walken.