Pace Prints is pleased to announce an exhibition of new monoprints and paintings by David Salle, on view October 18 - November 16, 2024, at 536 West 22nd Street. An opening reception will be held at the gallery on Thursday, October 17, 6–8pm.
David Salle is a contemporary American painter, printmaker, and photographer known for his collage-like paintings layering figures and patterns into complex, intensely colored, dynamic compositions. The works in this exhibition spotlight Salle’s life-long engagement with radical juxtaposition—how disparate images in proximity work as modifiers of tone and meaning.
Continuing his ongoing Tree of Life series, Salle’s new monoprints center vibrantly colored tree trunks that anchor disorderly scenes of cartoon-like characters engaged in various aspects of the human comedy. Each image is divided into two compartments in the fashion of medieval and Renaissance predella panels, or altarpieces. In the top section, the icon of the tree references the biblical origin story of humanity. Set among the branches are stereotypical male and female figures drawn from the work of illustrator Peter Arno, whose graphic style became synonymous with the aesthetic of the New Yorker Magazine from its founding in 1925 until his death in 1968. Arno’s drawings were noted for their perceptive satirical commentary on themes of sex and class in New York City's affluent society. Salle re-imagines and re-creates Arno’s characters using a relief printing technique, and then drops them into a setting rife with spiritual meaning and deliberately scrambled cultural values. In the lower compartments, which are created with pigmented paper pulp, Salle explores the roots of the tree, or the underworld, a sense of memory and a collective past, with hand painted elements: a truncated torso, a blooming flower, or studies of hands, among others. A glance can read doubly as beckoning or horrified, a rogue skirt either playful or sinister.
David Salle’s Windows series in this exhibition re-deploys some of the same figures from the monotypes, but in a different context. The Windows combine digitally printed images and silkscreen techniques with hand painting. The imagery is derived from his 2023 NFT series, Party of Animals, a collection of unique digital artworks made by re-mixing elements drawn from Salle's evolution as a painter for over forty years. Each work combines a character, painted in high-key color, absorbed in a moment of private reverie or drama posed in front of a painted backdrop drawn from the artist's un-commonly diverse oeuvre. Each composite figure/ground composition is framed by a witty line drawing of an apartment house window, acting as both a frame and stage. The figure/ground relationship is pushed to a new level; the characters interact with their interiors in a way that tightly fuses the narrative with the pictorial.
As the artist says, "The elements of my paintings were stripped down, isolated, and then recombined for maximum compression and concision." Some of the composite images are moody and melancholic; others are laugh-out-loud funny. The combinations are in every case vivid, direct, and surprising.