David Salle is one of the most important postmodern painters of the last fifty years. His art is one of juxtaposition, his artistic “style” a fusion of different, contrasting styles. Since the 1980s, Sal has drawn compelling images from art history, print advertising, and most extensively, his own photographs. He uses this raw material to create new and provocative scenes and brings them to life in paintings. Sal’s creative approach is to react to certain “givens”; to engage in a visual call and response with them. This aspect of his work is similar to how certain painters of the mid-century, notably Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, incorporated found objects into their paintings; American flags or city fragments were “gifts” to which Rauschenberg and Johns responded.
paintings in my frankenstein Continuing Salle’s research into how machine learning can be combined with traditional painting techniques. Over the past few years, Sal has worked with an engineer to create a generative proprietary artificial intelligence model that is trained on aspects of his own work, feeding it a rigorously edited selection of past works and prompting it to generate new image configurations. Weird, counterintuitive re-imaginings of Thrall’s original paintings by artificial intelligence have become the new “what ifs” in Thrall’s latest work.
Artificial intelligence composition forms a pixelated background, enlarged and printed on the canvas, onto which the artist applies new layers of painterly images. Sal selected, modified, and redrawn each model at will, creating a dramatic compositional interplay between himself and the machine models he made. exist morningThe edges and intersections of each canvas are filled with references to traditional art genres, including still lifes, landscapes, life model paintings, and history paintings, acting like a metaphysical glue holding the compositions together.
the title of the exhibition, my frankensteinreflects the artist’s awareness of the conflicts inherent in his embrace of this still-evolving new technology. Mary Shelley’s novel is a powerful metaphor for the unintended consequences of scientific ambition frankenstein People are cautioned against blind faith in their own beliefs and methods – or any prescriptive methodology.
The painting also embodies Frankenstein-like stitching of images. The Master and the Margarita (2025), like the exhibition’s title, is named after a famous novel – in this case, Mikhail Bulgakov’s satire of the Soviet state at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Sal’s dynamic creative process results in paintings with the vast energy of total abstraction, but achieved through the use of figurative imagery. He alternates between working with and against his own AI models, resulting in works that are rhythmic, sensory complex, and highly emotional. Each work visually embodies a central question of our time: Who is ahead, humans or machines?
