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BAM to host Brooklyn-based painter, writer David Salle

Brooklyn BookBeat: Launch of Salle’s Essay Collection ‘How to See: Looking, Talking, and Thinking About Art’

October 26, 2016 Brooklyn Daily Eagle
David Salle. Photo by Robert Wright
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Renowned painter David Salle distills contemporary art to its essentials in his new series of essays “How to See: Looking, Talking, and Thinking about Art.” The Brooklyn-based artist will visit the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) on Nov. 1 to discuss the collection with Lorin Stein, editor of The Paris Review.

In the essays, Salle strips away complicated theory and describes contemporary art in the plain language artists use when talking to each other in order to explore such wide ranging subjects as “the what and the how” (how an artist gives form to an idea), “originators and enforcers” (artists who invent ideas versus those who distill and perfect them) and how artists understand their work as a conversation with art history.

In his own unique way, Salle shows readers how to see like artists and paints intimate portraits of his friends and contemporaries, from Roy Lichtenstein to Jeff Koons. A New York City native, Salle comes to BAM to discuss his work and the theory behind it. 

Salle is a visual artist whose paintings are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Guggenheim Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Gallery in Washington, D.C., Los Angeles County Art Museum, Tate Modern, and National Galerie Berlin, among other institutions. Although known primarily as a painter, Salle’s work grows out of a long-standing involvement with performance. Over the last 25 years, he has worked extensively with choreographer Karole Armitage, creating sets and costumes for many of her ballets and operas. Their collaborations have been staged at venues throughout Europe and America, including the Metropolitan Opera House, Paris Opera, BAM and Deutsche Oper in Berlin. His essays and interviews about art have appeared in Artforum, Art in America, Modern Painters, and The Paris Review, as well as in numerous exhibition catalogs and anthologies. He is a regular contributor to Town & Country magazine.   

Stein is the editor of The Paris Review and an editor-at-large at Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Over the years he has worked with such writers as Lydia Davis, Jonathan Franzen, John Jeremiah Sullivan and James Wood. Stein’s criticism has appeared in Harper’s, London Review of Books, and The New York Review of Books. His translation of Michel Houellebecq’s Submission was published last year. In 2014 he was named a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters for his service to French literature.

The Nov. 1 event will take place at 7 p.m. at BAM Café, 30 Lafayette Ave. Tickets are $25 (ticket only) or $45 (includes book).

 

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