David Salle

By the early 1980s, Salle was among the most discussed painters in New York. His canvases work through superimposition: a sombre, near-monochromatic layer beneath carries one set of imagery, while a more colourful, linear layer above introduces another. The two rarely resolve into a coherent reading. Critic Robert Rosenblum described the effect as an eerie environment where incomplete fragments from the widest range of visual languages wander about like displaced persons.

His 1985 triptych "Muscular Paper" is characteristic: disembodied heads drawn from Ribera's seventeenth-century "The Club-Footed Boy" overlay undressed female figures, while separate panels quote a Brassaï photograph of a Picasso sculpture and imagery from Max Beckmann placed over a plaid design. The borrowings from art history are numerous, but synthesis is refused. Meaning floats rather than settles.

Salle received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1986 and directed a feature film, "Search and Destroy," in 1995. His work is held at the Whitney Museum, MoMA, the Stedelijk, and the Guggenheim Bilbao. He published "How to See," a collection of writing on art, in 2016: a book that argues for attention over theory, which is more or less what his paintings have always demanded.