Untitled [Head of a Woman]

Salle was a student of John Baldessari at CalArts before coming to prominence in the early 1980s alongside artists like Eric Fischl and Julian Schnabel, who heralded a return to painting and the figure. Salle draws from a broad range of visual referents, including film, advertising, pornography, cartoons, literature, art history, and his own photographs. He varies his style along with his subjects so that a single canvas might include grisaille, photorealism, and gestural abstraction. This watercolor relates to a series of paintings from the same year in which images of women, such as this one, occupy the lower part of the canvas, while the upper part is a palimpsest of marks and gestural scrawls.