David Salle

David Salle (born 1952 in Norman, Oklahoma) rose in the early 1980s as a defining figure of the Pictures Generation, his large canvases layering appropriated imagery, art-historical fragments, and cinematic juxtapositions. A painter’s painter and an incisive critic (How to See, 2016), he has spent four decades thinking about how images mean.

Sending the machine to art school

For his New Pastorals series (2024–), Salle worked with engineer Grant Davis to train a custom version of Stable Diffusion exclusively on his own Pastoral paintings from the late 1990s and early 2000s — a closed loop of his own imagery rather than scraped data. The model generates deconstructed, recombined backgrounds that are printed on linen, over which Salle paints by hand: fragmented figures, disembodied arms, the vivid detritus of postwar American imagery.

The works debuted at Gladstone Gallery in New York in late 2024 and travelled to Thaddaeus Ropac in London in 2025. Salle described the training process to The Art Newspaper as pedagogy — teaching the model composition and color the way one teaches an art student — and critics largely received the series as an extension of his lifelong method of appropriation, this time appropriating himself through a machine.

Salle’s adoption carries weight precisely because his generation built careers interrogating authorship and the copied image. Where many painters see AI as the end of the hand, Salle uses it to force his own hand somewhere new — the algorithm proposes, the painter disposes.