David Salle

Published by The Arts Club of Chicago with a foreword and text by Janine Mileaf, and an interview by Hal Foster.

In the 1980s, American artist David Salle played a crucial role in the formulation of postmodernism in art, helping to reestablish painting as a dominant force. Often thought to use only found imagery, Salle derived much of his early work from live movement events that he staged specifically for the paintings. For his 1992 series Ghost Paintings, Salle took photographs of his longtime model Beverly Eaby, creating graceful, improvised movements with a bedsheet, then printing the images on linen and painting over them with horizontal fields of intense color. This new volume, with full-color spreads of the 16 never-before-seen Ghost Paintings, reveals Salle’s practice of incorporating photography and performance art into his paintings. It includes the black-and-white photographs the artist took for this series, as well as documentation of other performances.