On a sunny afternoon in Sprüth Magers gallery in Los Angeles, David Salle and I are talking about time management. We are surrounded by his paintings in the newly opened My Frankenstein solo show, his first show in Los Angeles since 1997. I find that particularly surprising, not just because of his cinematic version of America and his place in the pantheon of The Pictures Generation, or because he went to art school here, but because 29 years is, simply, a long time. “People make a big deal about this, but I've been coming to LA pretty regularly for decades,” Salle tells me. “I haven't shown here in a while—just never the right circumstances.”
I wanted to ask him why the circumstances were right now, this year, but I think Salle isn’t so much looking back but in the thick of the now. In particular, he is navigating what a painter of representational art and what was called “excerptation” looks like in 2026. Frankenstein as a concept, the experiment that takes on the life of its own, is very much in line with the artist’s studio life, and I find Salle is trying to understand what technology and painting can do for each other. There are hiccups, as Salle saw a bit in the scavenging for imagery for this show, but there is also the tool of generating and finding imagery in each painting.
Mostly, I wanted to speak with Salle about what has been lost and what has been gained in the art world over the course of his career. From authoring How To See, to looking at the gaps in art criticism to his own practice, Salle was open and frank about where he sits now in the art world. There will always be lessons along the way, but time may not matter to him as much as I thought it would.
Evan Pricco: Welcome back to LA. You did go to school here, so I've been thinking about how much the art world here has changed. There was such a great school of people based here then. I hate comparing eras, but can you feel a difference when you come now?
David Salle: Of course. But let's put it in perspective: when I was here originally I was a kid. Everything is filtered through the eyes of an 18-year-old; that distorts memory and perception. I couldn't generalize about LA from that vantage alone. Still, the impression I retained was that the art world—what I experienced—felt contained. When something happened, people turned out. I remember Joan Jonas performing and hundreds showing up. The information chain worked, but activity was localized—small, isolated pockets: John Baldessari’s studio, or another person's place. There were a few landmarks and then things filled in around them.
Now everything has big, official institutions, polished facades. That wasn't the case in the '70s. But that's where the world has moved—more professionalized, more infrastructural. When I was in school, galleries clustered on La Cienega Boulevard: two blocks, small storefront spaces, some elegant, some spare. Now you have multiple districts and galleries with outposts downtown and elsewhere. It's bigger, more decentralized. That's not an artistic judgment, it's just the evolution of a city and the art world.
EP: New York back when you began your career had what I can only assume was this young energy—no polish, raw and exciting. Do you think there's too much polish now? Does it rob something from the scene?
DS: That's subjective. Polish is often a function of self-consciousness. There's more of that now—a feeling of empowerment or anointment that changes people's mood. It doesn't necessarily translate into anything concrete. New York still feels tougher, funkier—it's an older city always on the verge of crumbling. Chelsea's galleries are architecturally fortress-like now, but that’s recent. The real change is the tempo: people travel much more, dealers and artists are constantly on the move, fairs have multiplied, and the intersection of the art world and the travel industry is now one of the biggest changes of the last thirty years.
EP: Yesterday I went to a 99-cent store pop-up Barry McGee put together—about 150 artists dropped work in, all from different stages of their career, but the whole production was very much a DIY thing. Then I walked to LACMA to see an Impressionism show; there was a clear through thread about artists sharing studio spaces and hanging out. But when I came to your show, I started thinking about the people you grew up with. It feels like artists are pulling apart now—collective practice is more proprietary. Have you noticed that as you've gotten older and had to navigate larger studios and more success?
DS: I can only talk from experience, but yes—sometime before 2000 or 2010, you could often find people. You knew where they were: if I wanted to see Alex Katz, I could walk up and ring the bell. People were around. Then careers expanded—residencies, travel, art fairs—people weren't in their studios. Dealers who once were reliably at their desks started traveling. So the way people intersected changed: it was once stationary and local; now it's international and peripatetic. It's a tempo change—what you see is often glimpsed on screens or in brief encounters rather than slowly absorbed in person.
EP: That tempo thing makes sense. Speaking of your book—How to See—I want to ask about participation and the generosity of sharing. When do you know when to participate and when to take a step back and give advice and perspective to both others and yourself?
DS: You could invent a meter to measure that—there’d be money in it. It’s a big question of life. But really it's a question of desire. Engagement comes and goes. Some decades you feel detached from certain scenes; you're not the audience and there's no reason to force it. Other times you walk into a show and recognize a sensibility and feel energized. Writing about art inevitably changes how you see your own work. When I wrote, I felt criticism had become self-referential, detached from the experience of looking. That was a call to arms for me. Writing is hard; it takes time. To dedicate that time I had to feel it was necessary.
EP: Did you expect the book to resonate with painters the way it did? Friends have told me it was a relief—an artist speaking plainly instead of critics cloaked in theory.
DS: I wrote it because criticism felt irrelevant to my experience. Also, I had friends in the literary community whose standards were very high; that inspired me to try to write at a similar level. The book stemmed from a need to make sense of how painting felt from inside.
EP: Did writing about other people's work change how you thought about your own practice?
DS: Yes. Writing about art forces you to ask what a thing is actually doing. There are many claims about works that don't match lived experience. Asking what's really happening—whether a painting does what it's said to do—was fundamental for me. Too much theory can say anything; there needs to be a tether back to seeing and making.
EP: Did you always know you wanted to be a painter?
DS: Pretty much. I flirted with other things, but ultimately that's how I saw myself. Practically, I couldn't have done architecture—the math was beyond me.
EP: Let's talk about the stacks—the teacups, cookies. You use that motif a lot in this show, My Frankenstein.
DS: Stacks are about precariousness. Teacups are fragile; stacking them invites trouble. It's a historical still-life trope and also a compositional device: scale, mass, gravity, color, direction. They act as counterpoint to figurative images. If it works, you get a vibration—two different frequencies humming simultaneously.
EP: I saw an element of escalation—humans always push things further, stack them, double down on meaning. It felt like a comment on that impulse.
DS: Yes, fragility is there. But on another level, the stack is just a useful compositional tool. It could be anything vertical and fill the same structural needs in the painting.
EP: When did you start using technology—AI specifically—in your work? Were you resistant?
DS: Artists tend to try things—sand in paint, painting floors, house paint. I wasn't formally resistant to technology in the long run, but I didn't adopt computers right away. My working method long involved making backgrounds or provisional elements by hand so I could respond to them. When AI could produce backgrounds that functioned as evocative starting points, it fit into my method. The key was translating those outputs into painterly material. It's about how to print them and treat them on canvas.
EP: AI learns from what’s already out there. What do you think about that—using a machine trained on a vast repository of images?
DS: AI models—stable diffusion, openAI variants—are trained on billions of images scraped from the internet. They acquire a visual vocabulary but have no intention, no compositional will, no understanding of edge or brushstroke. Engineers building these systems aren't necessarily trained in the history of painting, so the machine doesn’t know what a brushstroke is or what an edge does to a silhouette. I decided to teach the machine some fundamentals: how an edge should be treated, how brushmarks function as shapes, how color relationships work. I trained it on paintings with baroque compositional complexity. It took about a year and a half to get results that were interesting—images that suggested things I wouldn't have thought of myself.
EP. So you trained it to understand painterly decisions, not just image content.
DS: Exactly. I had to make the machine attentive to mark quality and edge behavior, which largely determine style. Once I built that vocabulary into the training, the outputs started to offer productive surprises.
EP: You mentioned revisiting older ideas—that circularity seems important to these works.
DS: Very much so. Revisiting the past through new processes is part of the practice. I've had distinct shifts in my work—mannerisms and phases—and this method lets me mine earlier ideas in ways I didn't have time or inclination for when they first appeared.
EP: Let's talk about openings. Do they still give you a rush or a fear?
DS: Openings are rituals. They're social moments where you see people—sometimes it's the only time you see certain friends. But the main sting is showing a new body of work for the first time. Each new group of paintings is its own world; you're never entirely sure if the public will find it convincing. I do studio viewings where I ask for honest, even brutal feedback, because you can't afford to surround yourself with yes-people. That helps, but public reception is different. Once the works are on the wall I generally feel more secure—I've done the work, and whether it lands is another matter.
EP: When was the last time another artist's show made you want to go back to the studio? Like made you feel your own creative juices flowing, so to speak.
DS: Oh good question. It happens frequently. Seeing other people's work is energizing. I recently saw Rose Wylie in London—her work knocked me out. Jasper Johns' Cross paintings are a recurring high-water mark for me; seeing them again makes me want to paint. I've seen shows this year that returned me to that workshop energy—Sterling Ruby's work in New York was very stimulating. Seeing great art fires up something in you; it's like being reminded of what the work can do.
EP: I wanted to ask more about how these works function stylistically—about edges, brushwork, and the relationship between image and background.
DS: Edges are decisive. The way two forms meet—how you render the boundary—determines a lot of what we call style. For example, you can have a hard edge that isolates forms, or a soft edge that integrates them into the field. A brushstroke is also a shape with color and volume. When you treat a brushstroke as an independent shape, it has compositional implications. Teaching that to a machine was one thing; learning to integrate it into printed backgrounds was another. I like the contrast of a meticulously rendered figurative element against a lyrical, machine-generated field. That friction—the contrast between different modes of making—is where the paintings derive their charge.
EP: That friction seems to create a kind of unresolved harmony—like two tuning forks at different frequencies.
DS: Exactly. You don't resolve the difference; you live with it. The painting is about holding those tensions. One element might be scale-heavy and sculptural, another flat and graphic; together they sing.
EP: Has the introduction of AI altered the way you teach or talk about painting when mentoring young artists?
DS: I haven't fundamentally changed my core advice: look closely, learn craft, pay attention to color and edge, and know art history. But I do encourage young artists to be pragmatic about tools. Technology is a tool like any other—useful if it helps you explore. Don't adopt tech because it's fashionable; adopt it if it addresses a real need in your work. Also, be skeptical of systems that promise instant visibility—art is usually a long-term conversation.
EP: In your practice, do you feel pressure to make statements about technology, identity, or politics, or do you try to keep painting as a distinct, formal inquiry?
DS: I don't think art needs to act as a news ticker. Painting is a medium with its own conditions: surfaces, edges, color relations, pictorial space. That said, paintings inevitably live in a context and talk to their time. You don't have to force topical subjects into every work; often the most profound statements are formal. Formal decisions can be political in indirect ways—how you place figures, what you include or omit. But the pressure to make overt statements often leads to didactic art. I prefer ambiguity and complexity.
EP: Going back to the stack motif—have you ever considered doing a series where the stack collapses or is absent as a thematic statement?
DS: The idea of collapse is always latent. Stacks imply potential failure. Sometimes I paint stacks that are steady, sometimes ones that are about to tip. The absence of a stack could be the subject—a void where precariousness used to be. It depends on what the painting needs. I like leaving suggestions open so viewers bring in their own sense of tension.
EP: One last question about legacy: at this point in your career, do you think about legacy—or is that phrase meaningless when you're in the middle of working?
DS: I think about a few practical things: making work that has an internal integrity, not pandering to trends, and helping younger artists when possible. Legacy is partly outside your control—it’s how future viewers and institutions choose to treat your work. You can aim for honesty and craft, which increases the chance the work will have longevity, but beyond that it's not something you can engineer. So I focus on the present—the painting in front of me.
Interview by Evan Pricco
All photography by Max Knight for The Unibrow
