David Salle: Ghost Paintings

In the 1980s, American artist David Salle (born 1952) 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 actually 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.