One of Eight Prints from the Portfolio, The Drunken Chauffeur
Artist
David Salle
(American, born 1952)
Date1983
Mediumscreenprint
Dimensions75.5 x 104.8 cm (29 3/4 x 41 1/4 in.)
ClassificationsPrints
Credit LineGift of Sidney Rose, in memory of his parents, Mary D. and Philip Rose
Object number1984.163.8
Label Text
David Salle was central to his generation’s postmodern engagement with figuration beginning in the 1980s. The Drunken Chauffeur employs vibrant colors and frantic linework resulting in a tangle of overlapping imagery whose sources range from cartoons, pulp romance, film, pornography, and 20th-century art. Bits of information reverberate including several female faces and a buxom saluting nurse who is interrupted by a phallic-snouted and suit-attired crocodile. Discontinuities (of subject matter, spatial depth, scale, orientation, color) rather than meaningful connections abound. Unlike the direct quotations and photo-mechanical processes used by predecessors like Warhol, Rauschenberg, and Polke to transpose mass media imagery from one context to another, Salle’s images are purposefully paraphrased through the act of drawing and, as a result, become something entirely new. Similarly, with Salle’s work our normal way of digesting images becomes instead a confrontation with self-consciousness and ambiguity.
ProvenanceSidney Rose, Worcester, MAOn View
Not on view