David Salle was born in 1952 in Norman, Oklahoma. He grew up in Wichita, Kansas and from 1973 to 1975 attended the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), where he studied with John Baldessari. He is a neo-expressionist painter who gained prominence in the 1980s as a leader in the return to figuration. He is well known for his large-scale canvases featuring a sparse, seemingly disjunctive arrangement of elements, often including provocatively posed women and nudes and the use of grisaille. In 1976 he moved to New York City, where he found work in a publishing house that specialized in romance and pornography magazines and began to collect images from its archive. Salle saved a group of stock photographs depicting nudes, sporting events, airplane crashes, and such, which he later used as source material for his paintings. His earliest work involved the strategy of overlaying images, and this quickly became his signature style. Salle, together with such contemporaries as Julian Schnabel and Robert Longo, regenerated big, gestural, expressionist painting after years of pared-down minimalism and conceptual art. Solo exhibitions of his works have been held at museums and galleries worldwide, including the Witney Museum of American Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, MoMA Vienna, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Castello di Rivoli.. Salle actually lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.