David Salle (b. 1952, Norman, Oklahoma; lives and works in New York). David Salle received both a BFA and an MFA from the California Institute of Arts, Los Angeles (1973 and 1975). Solo exhibitions of his work have been organized at the Dallas Contemporary, Dallas (2015); Arts Club of Chicago, Chicago (2014); Metropolitan Opera House, New York (2012); Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey, Mexico (2000); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (1999); Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung, Ludwig, Vienna (2000); Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Castello di Rivoli, Turin, Italy (2000); and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Spain (1999). In 1987, at age 34, Salle was the youngest artist ever to be honored with a mid-career survey exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Select group exhibitions featuring his work include Before/On/After: William Wegman and California Conceptualism, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2018); Zeitgeist, Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Geneva, Switzerland (2017); Fast Forward: Paintings from the 1980s, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2017); Third Space/Shifting Conversations About Contemporary Art, Birmingham Museum of Art, Alabama (2071); Unfinished Business: Paintings from the 1970s and 1980s by Ross Bleckner, Eric Fischl, and David Salle, Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, NY (2016); Inspired by True-Life Events, CAC Malaga, Spain (2016); America is Hard to See, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2015); This Will Have Been: Art, Love, & Politics in the 1980s, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2012); and The Pictures Generation, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2009). His work is in numerous international public and private collections including Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Tate Modern, London; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.
Salle is also a prolific writer on art. His essays and reviews have been published in Artforum, Art in America, Modern Painters, and The Paris Review, as well as in numerous exhibition catalogs and anthologies. A recent volume of Salle’s collected essays, How to See, was published by W.W. Norton in October 2016.