John Salt – Paintings will offer visitors to the RBSA Gallery in Birmingham’s Jewellery Quarter a rare opportunity to see the remarkable work of distinguished Birmingham born and trained artist John Salt, in the UK. The son of a car body workshop owner in Sheldon, John enrolled at the Birmingham School of Art at the age of 15 and, after completing the rigorous NDD course in 1958, graduated to the Slade School of Art in London. America soon beckoned and John won a scholarship to the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, which had a profound effect on his direction as a painter.
“I wanted something that’s not art. Something that’s different, cool. After all this time I’d finally got rid of all these influences and it was really me.” John Salt
John settled in New York in 1967 and, inspired by walks through Brooklyn, began using photographs he had taken himself to inspire his work. It was the down-at-heel aspects of the urban landscape that captured his imagination, and, alongside artists like Richard Estes and Robert Bechtle, John was soon acknowledged as one of the pioneers of the American Photorealist movement. Unlike Estes and Bechtle however, his exquisitely detailed paintings created with brush, air brush, and stencils examine the flip side of the American Dream; old Cadillacs and Pontiacs parked up deserted side streets on the edge of town. John’s images of shabby trailer homes on the margins of the interstate highway represent life at the bottom of the social ladder, and three of these are shown in the exhibition, including the oil painting, “Three Toned Trailer” from 1975.
In 1978, John moved back to the UK with his family but continued to focus on American subjects, producing just one English photo-realist work; a view of the shopfront of the Ironmongers at Quality Square in Ludlow, which is on display in the exhibition.
“We are enormously grateful to John’s widow Jean, and to his family, for loaning us works from their personal collections of John Salt artworks. What also makes this exhibition really special is that we have been able to access John’s studio and can include materials and equipment used by John which, up until now, has never been displayed in public.” Said Brendan Flynn, RBSA Professor of Art History.
Paintings offers a rare opportunity to see examples of John Salt’s pre-American work, with abstracted compositions and domestic interiors that reveal an interest in the then fashionable Kitchen Sink School of the 1950s. The show also includes some of the artist’s studio equipment and his original photographs which formed the inspiration for his astonishing paintings.
The exhibition runs from 13 to 24 August.