
Exhibition preview·Paris
David Salle Brings His Venice Biennale Paintings to Paris — Made With an AI Trained on His Own 1990s Work
David Salle's 'The Venice Paintings' opens 21 October at Thaddaeus Ropac Pantin, a curated selection of the works he showed at Palazzo Cini during the 61st Venice Biennale. The new paintings were made with a custom AI model trained on his 1990–91 Tapestry Paintings — which Salle frames as resistance to the idea of AI replacing artists.
David Salle will open 'The Venice Paintings' at Thaddaeus Ropac's Pantin space on 21 October 2026, with a preview from 6:30 to 8:30pm. The exhibition runs through 23 December and presents a curated selection of the works the American painter exhibited earlier this year at Palazzo Cini in Venice, during the 61st Venice Biennale.
The new paintings were produced with a custom artificial-intelligence model trained on Salle's own Tapestry Paintings of 1990–91, the large-scale canvases in which he overlaid imagery drawn from advertising, art history and popular culture. Rather than treating the technology as a shortcut, Salle has described the process as a form of resistance to the notion that AI might replace artists — using the model as a collaborator trained exclusively on his own pictorial language.
The Pantin opening lands in the middle of Paris's busiest art week, with the Art Basel Paris preview days falling on 20 and 21 October. Ropac's announcement positions the show as one of the week's anchor gallery exhibitions, giving collectors in town for the fair a first look at a body of work that extends Salle's long-standing engagement with image overload and appropriation.
Salle, now in his seventies, remains one of the most closely watched painters of his generation, and the Venice-to-Paris trajectory of these works — from a historic palazzo on the Grand Canal to Ropac's converted Pantin warehouse — underscores the market's continued appetite for late-career statements by established American painters.


