Character in Art

Tuesday, February 2, 2016, 7 - 8:30pm

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'This is the Fun,' 2014-15. David Salle. Oil, acrylic and archival digital print. Image courtesy of the artist

'This is the Fun,' 2014-15. David Salle. Oil, acrylic and archival digital print. Image courtesy of the artist

In a free, public lecture David Salle, a painter, writer, set designer and film maker, looks at "failed" paintings and asks, "How does one form an artistic identity?"

David Salle appears as part of the Spring 2016 Intradisciplinary Seminar, part of the Robert Lehman Visiting Artist Program at The Cooper Union. We are grateful for major funding support from the Robert Lehman Foundation, Inc.

David Salle helped define the post-modern sensibility by combining figuration with an extremely varied pictorial language. Solo exhibitions of his work have been held at museums and galleries worldwide, including the Whitney Museum; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; MoMA Vienna; Menil Collection, Houston; Haus der Kunst, Munich; Tel Aviv Museum of Art; Castello di Rivoli; and the Guggenheim, Bilbao.

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; The Paris Opera; The Opera Comique; Lyon Opera; Brooklyn Academy of Music and the Opera Deutsche, Berlin. In 1995, Salle directed the feature film Search and Destroy, starring Griffin Dunne and Christopher Walken.

Salle is also a prolific writer on art. His essays and interviews have appeared in Artforum, Art in America, Modern Painters, The Paris Review, and Arts Magazine, as well as numerous exhibition catalogs and anthologies. He is a regular contributor for Town & Country Magazine. How to See, a volume of Salle's collected essays, will be published by W.W. Norton in Fall, 2016.
 

Located in the Frederick P. Rose Auditorium, at 41 Cooper Square (on Third Avenue between 6th and 7th Streets)

  • Founded by inventor, industrialist and philanthropist Peter Cooper in 1859, The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art offers education in art, architecture and engineering, as well as courses in the humanities and social sciences.

  • “My feelings, my desires, my hopes, embrace humanity throughout the world,” Peter Cooper proclaimed in a speech in 1853. He looked forward to a time when, “knowledge shall cover the earth as waters cover the great deep.”

  • From its beginnings, Cooper Union was a unique institution, dedicated to founder Peter Cooper's proposition that education is the key not only to personal prosperity but to civic virtue and harmony.

  • Peter Cooper wanted his graduates to acquire the technical mastery and entrepreneurial skills, enrich their intellects and spark their creativity, and develop a sense of social justice that would translate into action.