David Salle: Debris (KARMA, NEW YORK)

Debris assembles paintings and ceramics made by American artist David Salle (born 1952) over the past five years. Regarded as one of the originators of postmodernism in painting, Salle employs his recognizable style of juxtaposition and visual simultaneity in these most recent works. A number of paintings make use of highly abstracted photographic silk-screens that reveal, upon closer inspection, tightly cropped tangles of wire and wood washed up on a beach near the artist’s Long Island home. Though Salle has often affixed ceramic objects to the canvas in the past, here the smashed or collapsed vessel and platter shapes begin for the first time to take on the agency and autonomy of independent art objects.
Including an interview with the artist, this elegant volume is a tribute to Salle’s merging of figurative tradition with abstraction, and to the dialogue he creates between disparate elements.