The Guest List

FOR DAVID SALLE the artworks in a group exhibition are a lot like the guests of a cocktail party. “There are the people you want to talk to, and the bores you can’t wait to get away from,” Salle says. “Everyone at this party is a lively talker.” Salle has curated his latest party, Clever, Quick, Magnetic: The Art of Witty Banter, gathering the work of thirty major artists at Oklahoma Contemporary Arts Center this fall for a conversation through abstract painting.

In the art world, David Salle has taken many forms—painter, printmaker, photographer, art historian, art critic. For more than forty years Salle has steadily shaped our post-modern and contemporary art moments through his words and through his brushstrokes. The role of curator is perhaps just another medium for Salle to express his unique ways of making and observing. For this exhibition Salle takes you by the hand, leads you into the center of an artwork, and asks you to look around.

His collection of essays, How to See: Looking, Talking, and Thinking About Art provides the lens from which to view Clever, Quick, Magnetic, and it starts by asking a lot of questions. What are these artists doing together in one exhibition? What do these paintings say collectively? Can an artwork possess a personality? What do you see? Alex Katz’s concisely iconic portraits, Cecily Brown’s disorienting and vivid scenes, Neo Rauch’s moody surrealism, and Amy Sillman’s musical shapes all bring their own styles and intentions. This exhibition is as much about looking with a magnifying glass as it is about taking the glasses off and letting the edges blur together.

“There’s a great deal of visual excitement in each work,” Salle says. “And they all reward prolonged looking.” That is, the longer you look, the more you notice, the more interesting the party becomes. He explains that there are many reasons to do a show like this, one of which is access. Unless you’re regularly able to travel to New York or other cities with major museums, these artworks may only exist to you in the digital world, which, Salle says, is not a sufficient setting for getting to know a painting.

“Paintings are physical objects. They have a surface, and this surface has a specificity that is difficult to capture via photography,” Salle says. “It’s very important to see things in person.”

Salle was born in Norman, Oklahoma, and grew up in Kansas, where he began studying art in his elementary years at the school of the Wichita Art Association, known today as Mark Arts. A loan show that had originated from the Museum of Modern Art in New York made its way to Wichita, where a young Salle experienced the work of Abstract Expressionists Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Clyfford Still, and Willem de Kooning face-to-face for the first time. It is not lost on Salle the profound impact this can have on people—he’s been there. “I would have never seen those paintings in real life, in that time and place, if it hadn’t been for this institution,” he says.

Trent Riley, Oklahoma Contemporary’s executive director, also recognizes the potential that this exhibition holds for the local community, and says it’s a continuation of the art center’s relevance on a global cultural scale. “It marks a significant moment for our institution and for the state, inviting audiences to engage with the work of one of Oklahoma’s most consequential and internationally recognized artists through a fresh and critically informed lens,” Riley says.

Salle approaches curation much like you might expect a painter to, balancing technical know-how with measured creative liberty. Many of the artists in Clever, Quick, Magnetic are contemporaries of Salle’s: Verne Dawson, Carroll Dunham, Rosa Loy, Albert Oehlen. Others, such as Tamo Jugeli and Walter Price, are of a
newer generation. This is another thing they have in common: These works have been steeping in Salle’s mind, whether through decades of personal friendship or more recent thoughtful study. Who better to make the case for the work than someone who knows it well?

“All the works in this show, regardless of the specifics of style, are expansive, confident, and open,” Salle says. “These artists prioritize invention, and they share a positive view of painting’s role in life.”

Clever, Quick, Magnetic: The Art of Witty Banter is on view at Oklahoma Contemporary Arts Center through January 11, 2027.