Contemporary artist David Salle has collaborated with AI to rediscover his artistic roots, resulting in a series of innovative paintings that blend human creativity with digital innovation.
David Salle, a renowned American artist, has been experimenting with machine learning software to create new works. He trained an AI model on his own paintings from the 1990s and 2000s, which resulted in a series of new pieces that blend human creativity with digital innovation.
David Salle is an American artist, known for his work in painting, printmaking, and photography.
Born in 1944, Salle was a key figure in the postmodern art movement of the 1980s.
His work often incorporates elements of history, politics, and popular culture, challenging traditional notions of 'art' and its role in society.
Salle has had numerous solo exhibitions worldwide and is represented in major museum collections, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum.
The Birth of New Pastorals
Salle’s collaboration with the AI model began as a game, where he challenged himself to develop a virtual game that would allow players to rearrange elements from his paintings. Although the tech proved impractical, it led him to meet Danika Laszuk and Grant Davis, who helped him develop an AI-powered sketchpad app called Wand. Together, they fed the AI with images of artists whose techniques Salle considers foundational – Andy Warhol for colour, Edward Hopper for volume, Giorgio de Chirico for perspective, Arthur Dove for line.
Breaking Down Boundaries
The first results were mixed, but Salle persisted, feeding the machine scans of gouaches he had been making and watching it respond to their watery edges. The AI could read the physicality of the brush stroke, fundamentally changing its way of thinking about itself. This evolution in painterly terms might take years or even decades.
Artificial intelligence (AI) refers to the development of computer systems that can perform tasks that typically require human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, and decision-making.
AI has numerous applications in industries like healthcare, finance, and transportation, improving efficiency and accuracy.
According to a report by Gartner, 'AI adoption is expected to reach 85% by 2025, with estimated global savings of $1.3 trillion.'
Key players in the AI market include Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, driving innovation through research and development.
A New Era in Landscape Painting
The New Pastorals series, unveiled at Thaddaeus Ropac in London, marks a significant departure from Salle’s previous work. The brushstrokes are looser, faster and thicker, more abstract expressionist than anything else he has ever done. Their subject matter is totally helter skelter, as if Salle has pulsed his older paintings in a blender.
The Artist’s Perspective
Salle isn’t worried that AI will outpace or replace him. He sees it as another tool, like a brush or an easel. ‘I don’t think the machine’s taught me very much at all,’ he declares. ‘I haven’t reconsidered how I think about pictorial space or composition. I’m simply taking what the machine offers after I’ve told it what I want.’
A Postmodern Legacy
Salle’s postmodern paintings are perfectly suited to this experiment: sampling omnivorously from so many subjects and styles, they seem less concerned with their original sources than gleefully unbothered by the concept of originality altogether. In 1985, when Salle was at the height of his fame, the art historian Rosalind Krauss dismissed originality as a ‘modernist myth’; every work of art borrows from other sources, whether it acknowledges them or not.
A New Frontier
Salle’s collaboration with AI raises questions about what might be borrowed from him and what might be created by machines in the future. For now, AI still needs humans to train it – that is, until the student becomes the teacher. The data collected by EAT__Works is proprietary, so his feedback won’t fuel any other artist-machines in the near future, though photographs of his new paintings could conceivably be used as prompts for further AI-generated images.
David Salle: Some Versions of Pastoral
The exhibition ‘Some Versions of Pastoral’ is on display at Thaddaeus Ropac London until 8 June.
