A painting by David Salle was removed from a new exhibition at Sprüth Magers in Los Angeles after critics questioned whether the painter had plagiarized another artist’s work.
Sal’s paintings, ax (2025), whose main subject is a woman in a black-and-white dress—her face cut off by the edge of the canvas—wielding a sledgehammer. The exhibition, titled “My Frankenstein,” opened on February 24, and discussions on social media quickly began discussing its similarities to Kelly Reemsten’s paintings Influence (2021).
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In a video that has been viewed nearly 10,000 times, Minneapolis artist Josie Lewis asked, “Did Sal steal this woman’s idea, or was it just harmless appropriation?” Reemtsen later shared the video on her Instagram page. She declined to comment art news.
Sal is often associated with the “Picture Generation”, a group of American artists who emerged in the mid-1970s and early 1980s, including Cindy Sherman, Louise Lawler, Robert Longo and Richard Prince, whose work explored the vast array of images available for mass consumption. These artists often work through photography, which involves drawing images from film, video, television and advertising or even the work of other artists. Saler is one of the few painters whom critics align with the group.
This type of work is often called appropriation art and is often controversial. Prince, for example, faced years of legal action over his estate. canal zone Painting (2008), which contains photographs by French photographer Patrick Cariou. Cariou eventually sued Prince, Gagosian Gallery and Rizzoli for copyright infringement.
In a statement emailed art newsArt dealers Monika Sprüth and Philomene Magers drew attention to Salle’s appropriation of the past, noting that he “has historically borrowed images from popular culture, advertising, art, his own photographs and other sources to create his own interpretations on canvas, continuing a long tradition of artists borrowing from the past and each other. In turn, his works have been used by other artists without his permission.”
They continue: “In his latest exhibition, My Frankenstein, Sal continues to mine a variety of images from the physical and online realms, some of which may be identifiable or attributable to other sources. He acknowledges that his use of Kelly Remteson’s images has rekindled a decades-long conversation about authorship for new audiences. While both Sal and the gallery believe this is an important conversation, after consultation with David Sal, the work has been removed from view out of respect for both artists.”
Thrall declined to comment.
The oil and acrylic paintings in Sal’s latest exhibition were created using artificial intelligence. In recent years, Sal has worked with an engineer to develop a generative artificial intelligence model that is trained on his own work, feeding it a selection of past works and prompting it to generate new image configurations.
Amy Adler, law professor of arts and law at New York University art news: “If this went into litigation, I think Salle would have a hard time defending this under fair use,” given the similarity and the fact that both men are fine artists. “(Salle) was one of the pioneers of this conversation about artistic borrowing, and I respect that removing this image was a gesture to (Reemtsen). Nonetheless, its removal has no legal significance under the copyright lawsuit.”
She added that his defense was likely to hinge on several key pressure points: whether the message or meaning of the original image was sufficiently altered; whether the purposes of the two works were different; and whether the differences in the artists’ price ranges effectively placed them in isolated markets.
“The court may be more nuanced and say his intent was to sell at a much higher market than hers,” Adler said.
According to the exhibition website, the project “reflects the artist’s awareness of the conflicts inherent in (Saar’s) embrace of such a still-evolving new technology.” The text adds that the works also serve as “powerful metaphors for the unintended consequences of scientific ambition,” referencing Mary Shelley’s novel frankenstein.
talking The Art Newspaper In April 2025, at his exhibition “Some Versions of the Pastoral,” David Salle described training his artificial intelligence to generate digital images as a “long process of trial and error” but ultimately “very rewarding… (and) inviting for my intervention” as an artist. He added that the experience enhanced his own “ability to react with a brush” and the “constant development of machine imagery.”
The process gets more complicated, Saar adds, “as I feed the machine dozens of paintings I’ve made that are basically rough sketches of people in space, domestic objects, natural things, domestic settings. But the subject matter isn’t important; what’s important is creating an edge with the brush—a mark and/or shape that makes sense.”
