For Salle, painting – like poetry or language generally – has a syntax that is sometimes hidden or disguised. It involves a counterbalance of contrasting elements: 'compression, juxtaposition, simultaneity, dissonance, humour, and resistance to closure, [...] It makes free use of surprising and abrupt transitions. It seeks to distil entire blocks of emotion and complex experiences into the telling detail, the closely observed fragment that stands in for the whole.' Containing allusions to Pop art, Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism, as well as cartoons from the 1940s through 1960s, his works combine various iconographies and formal qualities. Their kaleidoscopic effects seem to reflect a constant stream of simultaneous thoughts and feelings, constituting a deeply sympathetic and at times ironic stance towards contemporary life and the status of painting itself.

Born in 1952 in Norman, Oklahoma, Salle lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. He studied at the California Institute of the Arts from 1970 to 1975, where he was mentored by Conceptual artist John Baldessari. It was there that he first developed a strong interest in cinema and montage, as reflected in his earliest works. He came to prominence in the 1980s as a leading figure of the Pictures Generation, who questioned the status of the image through appropriation and the exploration of mass media.

Salle's first solo museum exhibition was held at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam in 1983, followed by his first retrospective in 1999 at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, which travelled to the Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna; Castello di Rivoli Museo d'Arte Contemporanea, Turin, Italy; and Guggenheim Bilbao, Spain. His work has since been shown at institutions including Musée National d’Art Moderne-Centre Pompidou, Paris; The Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others. Recent surveys of Salle’s work were held in 2016 at the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga and in 2020 at the Brant Foundation, Greenwich, CT. Salle is also a prolific writer and critic whose essays and interviews have been published in Artforum, Art in America, Modern Painters, The New York Times T-Magazine, and The Paris Review, as well as in numerous exhibition catalogues and anthologies. He is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books. His collection of critical essays, How to see, was published by W. W. Norton in 2016.