David Salle: Some Versions of Pastoral

Thaddaeus Ropac presents Some Versions of Pastoral, the first UK exhibition of David Salle’s latest body of work, the New Pastorals, and the artist’s first solo exhibition at the London gallery. The paintings are the result of a significant recent innovation in Salle’s art: his use of artificial intelligence as a tool to create more dynamic and conceptually rich compositions than ever before. ‘I have long dreamed of a truly malleable, elastic pictorial space,’ Salle says.

Over his career, David Salle has taken as his subject imagery from a wide range of sources, including magazines, advertisements, art history and cartoons. Though his subject matter is ostensibly figurative, Salle’s paintings locate the imagery in pure formal play and an all-over composition that is deeply rooted in Abstract Expressionism – what the artist describes as a ‘sensation of neither beginning nor ending […] a kind of circuitous freefall through the universe’. In these new paintings, the artist uses his own oeuvre – specifically, a group of paintings titled the Pastorals, executed in 1999 and 2000 – as raw material. Fed into a custom-made AI programme, the works are deliberately distorted to produce a variation on the pastoral scene. These freewheeling, sometimes bewildering images are then printed onto canvas to form the backdrops on which Salle paints. The result is a lyrical body of work that teems with new plasticity and seems to respond to our viral visual world.

In each painting, a miscellany of objects and anatomies converge on a single plane, where laws of gravity, space and perspective dissipate, and visual drama holds dominion. Salle renders some motifs with a masterful degree of virtuosity, while others are left unfinished and tapering. Plaid skirts are like threadbare nets, cast wide over a sea of swarming images, and shapes fail to cohere into anything except themselves: they emerge, only to slip back into the glitching, painterly abyss from which they surfaced.

Duration	10 April 2025 - 08 June 2025
Times	Tuesday—Saturday, 10am—6pm
Cost	Free
Venue	Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac
Address	Ely House, 37 Dover Street, London, W1S 4NJ
Contact	4402038138400 / polly.gaer@ropac.net / www.ropac.net

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