how to: An Evening with David Salle

David Salle is the leading American post-modernist painter, the shaping spirit of a movement which provocatively took the entire history of art as its raw material as well as subject matter. His works are mysteriously original, yet everything they contain has had a life elsewhere: in paintings, in advertising, in comics, in photographs, yet somehow the result is all art. To coincide with his new book – How to See: Looking, Talking and Thinking about Art– Salle will walk us through the museum without walls that is his world. The only things we need to bring are our intuition, curiosity and capacity to feel. He will show us ‘how to see’ with an artist’s eye, and what can be learnt by asking the right questions of a work: ‘What does it love, from what does it suffer, where does its heart lie?’

‘If John Berger’s Ways of Seeing is a classic of art criticism, David Salle’s How to See is the artist’s reply, a brilliant series of reflections on how artists think when they make their work. The ‘how’ of art has never been better explored.’ – Salman Rushdie

David Salle helped define the postmodern sensibility by combining figuration with an extremely varied pictorial language. Solo exhibitions of his work have been held at museums and galleries worldwide, including the Whitney Museum of American Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; MoMA Vienna; Menil Collection, Houston; Haus der Kunst, Munich; Tel Aviv Museum of Art; Castello di Rivoli; and the Guggenheim, Bilbao. His paintings are in the collections of many major museums, both here and abroad.

Although known primarily as a painter, Salle’s work grows out of a long-standing involvement with performance. Over the last 25 years he has worked extensively with choreographer Karole Armitage, creating sets and costumes for many of her ballets and operas. Their collaborations have been staged at venues throughout Europe and America, including The Metropolitan Opera House; The Paris Opera; Brooklyn Academy of Music and the Opera Deutsche, Berlin. In 1995, Salle directed the feature film Search and Destroy, starring Griffin Dunne and Christopher Walken. Salle is also a prolific writer on art. His essays and reviews have appeared in Artforum, Town and Country Magazine, Modern Painters, and The Paris Review, as well as numerous exhibition catalogs and anthologies. His collected How to See: Looking, Talking and Thinking about art was recently published by W.W. Norton.

Tickets £25 – £37.50 (plus booking fee).