David Salle: Tree of Life

Salle's new allegorical painting cycle identifies the tree as an image of collective experience

Pictures Generation painter, printmaker, photographer and stage designer David Salle (born 1952) began painting his Tree of Life series in 2019. These compositions are structured around brightly colored trees that simultaneously conceal and compose the scene unfolding behind them. Acting as a spine or an anchor, they appear to condition the interactions of the characters on either side, held in place as they are by the branching structure. The characters are borrowed from Peter Arno's midcentury illustrations for the New Yorker. The motif of the tree reverberates throughout the history of art, and Salle identifies the tree as a form of collective experience, a lineage of which we are all a part. This concise volume showcases these new paintings, the culmination of the celebrated Tree of Life series.