My Frankenstein
Sprüth Magers, Los Angeles
From February 26, untill April 25, 2026
There is something significant about David Salle choosing Los Angeles, in 2026, for his return. This is not a simple exhibition: it is a rare occasion. His last solo show in the city dates back to 1997. Nearly thirty years later, Sprüth Magers — the gallery at 5900 Wilshire Boulevard, in the heart of the Miracle Mile — opens its doors to a new series of paintings that confirm how Salle, more than forty years into his career, has lost none of his capacity to unsettle and seduce.
Born in 1952 in Norman, Oklahoma, Salle is one of the artists who most profoundly redefined the language of painting in the postmodern era. Trained at the California Institute of the Arts under John Baldessari, he developed a radical approach to composition that blends images from disparate sources — art history, advertising, photography, popular culture — without hierarchy, without a single narrative key. His canvases do not tell stories: they evoke them, interrupt them, multiply them.
“Juxtaposition is the art of the possible. A painting is more than the sum of its parts: it is the way those parts are brought together to move us, even when we are not aware of it.”
The new works presented at Sprüth Magers — among them Olympus (2025), Space Lady (2025), and Hatchet (2025), all made with oil, acrylic, flashe and charcoal on archival UV print on linen — show an artist in extraordinary form. The compositions carry the expansive energy of all-over abstraction, but built entirely with images: headless female figures wearing red gloves and white dresses, vivid red jackets in dialogue with Cézannesque still lifes, stylized suns and primary-colored mugs set in a landscape that feels borrowed from a dream. Each work is a visual chord: distant notes struck at the same moment, producing an unpredictable resonance.
Salle’s is a painting that embraces ambiguity without surrendering to chaos. His so-called “presentational mode” — a term he uses to describe his own poetics — consists of presenting images in their most direct, almost didactic form, then releasing them into the force field of juxtaposition. It follows the same logic as cinematic montage, applied to canvas: each element carries its own prior meaning, and the point is that these meanings collide, interrogate one another, and produce something third — neither one thing nor the other.
For those in Los Angeles over the coming weeks, this is not an appointment to miss. Not so much for the weight of Salle’s history — already celebrated through retrospectives at the Stedelijk in Amsterdam, the Whitney in New York, the Menil Collection in Houston — but for what these new paintings say about the present: about how we look, and how willing we are to resist the temptation of a finished meaning. The opening reception will take place on February 25th, with the exhibition on view through April 25, 2026.
For further information Spruethmagers.com.
