John Salt was an English artist, whose greatly detailed paintings from the late 1960s onwards made him one of the pioneers of the photorealist school.
14 Facts About John Salt
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John Salt was born and brought up in the Sheldon district of Birmingham.
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John Salt's father was a motor repair garage owner, whose stepfather in turn had been a signwriter painting stripes on the bodies of cars.
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John Salt returned to the Midlands to teach at Stourbridge College of Art and in 1964 was the first artist to exhibit at Birmingham's newly opened Ikon Gallery, where he had his first one-man show in 1965.
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Unhappy at the prospect of merely selecting which of a pre-existing set of styles he was to adopt John Salt sought a more distinct artistic identity and was encouraged to explore a wide variety of styles and techniques by Grace Hartigan, who was the head of the graduate programme at Baltimore and a major influence on John Salt's early career.
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John Salt's painting Untitled was a pivotal work in this respect, being very closely based on Winogrand's photograph New York City ; both featuring a closely zoomed image of the inside of a car viewed from the outside.
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John Salt had originally planned to return to England at the end of his Baltimore course in 1969, but when two of his Buick works were bought by an influential New York City art dealer he took Hartigan's advice and moved there instead.
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Grace Hartigan 8.
New York City saw John Salt develop a relationship with the art dealer Ivan Karp, who was on the point of opening his own gallery and was to develop a portfolio of artists associated with the emerging photorealist movement.
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John Salt had his first one-man exhibition in New York in 1969 and in 1972 featured in the documenta 5 exhibition in Kassel, Germany where the photorealist school first gained an international profile, since when he has exhibited widely worldwide.
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John Salt returned to England in 1978 and settled in Bucknell, Shropshire.
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John Salt's work continued to broaden in scope, with an increasing emphasis on the landscape and context of his subject matter, to the extent that in some later works such as Catskill Cadillac the subject is "not so much sinking into the landscape as being hidden by it".
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John Salt continued to live and paint in Shropshire until his death on 13 December 2021, at the age of 84.
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The result is that John Salt's pictures have an extreme level of detail and precision that lends them a heightened sense of reality and eliminates as far as possible the self-expression of the artist.
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John Salt's work has been accused of voyeurism in its impersonal and unforgivingly objective portrayals of impoverished lifestyles, something he has gone some way to acknowledge:.