John Salt
John Salt (born August 2, 1937 in Birmingham , Great Britain ) is a British contemporary painter and an important exponent of photorealism . John Salt is a major British painter and first generation photorealist, best known for his paintings of automobiles, which he often depicted destroyed or abandoned within a suburban or semi-rural American landscape.
life and work
John Salt was born and raised in Sheldon , Birmingham. His father had a car repair shop. Salt began drawing and painting as a child and was admitted to the Birmingham School of Art at the age of 15 , where he studied from 1952 to 1958. From 1958 to 1960 he studied at the Slade School of Art in London , where he was mainly influenced by the work of the English artist Prunella Clough and representatives of American Pop Art such as Robert Rauschenberg .
He had his first solo exhibition at the Ikon Gallery in London in 1965. He married in 1966 and decided to emigrate to the United States to find work at one of the many American art schools. He was admitted to the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore , where he received a place on a Master of Fine Arts program in 1967 and also a teaching position.
Influenced by a book by contemporary photographers Gary Winogrand and Lee Friedlander : “ Contemporary Photographers towards a Social Landscape ”, he began to paint the photographs shown there and then to find his own motifs. He paints cars, destroyed, abandoned, crushed and forgotten, in front of a wide variety of backgrounds, mostly in American landscapes and suburban areas.
John Salt was a participant in Documenta 5 in Kassel in 1972 in the pioneering Realism department .
In 1969 he moved to New York City and intensified his artistic activity. In 1978 he returned to England and settled in Bucknell , Shropshire , where he lives and works to this day.
Literature and Sources
- Exhibition catalog: documenta 5. Survey of Reality - Imagery Today ; Catalog (as a file folder) Volume 1: (Material); Volume 2: (list of exhibits); Kassel 1972
- documenta archive (ed.); Resubmission d5 - A survey of the archive on documenta 1972 ; Kassel / Ostfildern 2001, ISBN 3-7757-1121-X
Web links
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Salt, John |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | British painter |
| DATE OF BIRTH | August 2, 1937 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Birmingham , England |