John Salt

John Salt ( born August 2, 1937 in Birmingham, United Kingdom, lives in Bucknell, Shropshire, England ) is a British contemporary painters and an important representative of photorealism. John Salt is an important British painter and the first generation of Photorealists representatives, known for his pictures of cars he is often destroyed or abandoned in a suburban area or semi-rural American landscape.

Life and work

John Salt was born in Sheldon, Birmingham and grew up. His father had a car repair workshop. Even as a child Salt began to draw and paint and got at the age of 15 years, the approval for the Birmingham School of Art, where he studied from 1952 to 1958. From 1958 to 1960 he studied at the Slade School of Art in London, where he has been heavily influenced by the English artist Prunella Clough and representatives of the American pop art such as Robert Rauschenberg work.

He had his first solo exhibition at the Ikon Gallery in London in 1965. In 1966 he married and decided to emigrate to the United States to find work at one of the numerous American art schools. He got the recording at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, where he got a place with a Master of Fine Arts program in 1967 and also a teaching position.

Influenced by a book of contemporary photographers Gary Winogrand and Lee Friedlander: "Contemporary Photographers towards a Social Landscape ," he began to copy the photographs depicted there picturesque and then find his own motives. He paints cars, destroyed, abandoned, crushed and forgotten, in a wide variety of scenes, mostly in American landscapes and suburban areas.

John Salt was a participant in Documenta 5 in Kassel in 1972 in the pioneering department realism.

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 still lives and works today.

Literature and sources

• Exhibition catalog: documentation fifth survey of reality - imagery today; Catalog (as folders ) Volume 1: (material); Volume 2: ( list of exhibits ); Kassel in 1972
• Documenta Archiv (ed. ); Resubmission d5 - A survey of the archive to the documenta, 1972; Kassel / Ostfildern 2001, ISBN 3-7757-1121- X