David Salle (b. 1952). Lively Iris, 1992. Oil and silkscreen on canvas. 60 x 36 inches (152.4 x 91.4 cm). Signed, dated,...

Description

David Salle (b. 1952)
Lively Iris, 1992
Oil and silkscreen on canvas
60 x 36 inches (152.4 x 91.4 cm)
Signed, dated, and titled on the reverse: "Lively Iris" / David Salle / 1992

Property from a Distinguished Private Collection

PROVENANCE:
Galerie Templon, Paris;
Gagosian Gallery, New York;
Private collection;
Sotheby's, New York, October 6, 2005, lot 150;
Acquired by the present owner from the above.

David Salle emerged as a central voice in American Neo-Expressionism, a movement that revived figuration and emotional intensity in the 1980s after years dominated by minimal and conceptual art. His work is distinguished by a complex layering of imagery drawn from art history, mass media, and popular culture. By juxtaposing these visual fragments, Salle creates compositions that resist straightforward interpretation, inviting viewers to navigate shifting planes of meaning and association.

In Lively Iris, Salle combines oil and silkscreen on canvas to build a pictorial space that feels both cinematic and psychological. Repeated tabletops form a fragmented background that suggests domestic stillness, while scrolling, calligraphic forms weave through the surface like traces of a lost text. At the center, a yellow bird lies on a platter, rendered with unsettling stillness, and flanked by ghostly outlines of two cars. These disparate motifs, still life, script, and machinery and create a tension between beauty and unease, evoking the dissonant rhythms of modern visual culture. True to Salle's practice, Lively Iris offers a meditation on perception, memory, and the instability of narrative itself.


More information about David Salle. See also: Salle, David Artist.

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