Conversations in Context invited leaders from creative fields to reflect on the site’s past, present, and future, and to contribute their perspectives on the Glass House and its significance to contemporary debates.

One of the most important painters to emerge at the end of the 1970s, David Salle helped define the postmodern sensibility by combining figuration with an extremely varied pictorial language. The Glass House permanent collection contains four of Salle’s works: Black Watch (1983), Common Reader (1981),Drum (1980) and Miner (1985). His work has been exhibited in more than 100 museums and galleries worldwide, including the Whitney Biennial, Documenta, the Venice Biennale, Carnegie International, the Paris Biennale, and most recently, The Pictures Generation at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. As a painter whose work comes out of a tradition of installation and performance, Salle is a longtime collaborator with Karole Armitage, designing sets and costumes for more than twenty of her ballets and operas. Their collaborations have been staged at such venues as the Metropolitan Opera, the Joyce Theater, Paris Opera, Opera Comique, Opera Deutsche, Oper Berlin, and La Fenice.

Salle is represented in the collections of most modern art institutions, and solo exhibitions of his work have taken place at the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles; Castello di Rivioli; the Tel Aviv Museum; the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; the Guggenheim Bilbao; Haus der Kunst, Munich; Kestnergesellschaft, Hannover; and the Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien.

Salle has contributed his writings on art to such publications as Artforum, Art in America, Flash Art, and Modern Painters, as well as to numerous exhibition catalogues and anthologies. He received a Guggenheim fellowship for theater design in 1986 and in 1995 directed the feature film Search & Destroy starring Griffin Dunne and Christopher Walken.

The 2011 season of Conversations in Context was generously sponsored by BMW and Design Within Reach.

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