In Los Angeles, exhibitions of new work by artists Sarah Sze, David Salle, and Takashi Murakami although very different, struck me as very much speaking to our current moment: Each, in their own way, is engaged in recapturing, reimagining, reinterpreting, and generating images as part of their artwork. These artists are among the first generation to reach adulthood using computers, owning iPhones, and the first to have social media – which means they are also among the first to deal with the flood of images we face every day; and the first cohort of artists in the age of AI-generated images.
If the artists from the late 1970s such as Robert Longo, Barbara Kruger, Richard Prince, Sherrie Levine, and Cindy Sherman came to be known as “The Pictures Generation” (based on the art exhibit and essay by Douglas Crimp), then one can say of these artists today, that they are part of an “Images Generation.” Each is grappling with harnessing the torrent of visuals that bombard us; each wants to capture our attention and make us pay attention.
Sarah Sze’s recent show at Gagosian Beverly Hills, Feel Free, featured 11 art works and two video installations. In these new works, although abstract collages, the paintings look like landscapes: one can look at them and imagine mountains and lakes, with vertical trees reminiscent of Alex Katz’s forest paintings. However, the closer one looks, the multiplicity of marks, paint splatter, photos take precedence, while the vertical stripes give rhythm and definition to the works.
Sarah SZE, Sleepers, 2024. Mixed media, paper, string, video projectors, aluminum. Variable dimensions © Sarah Sze Photo: Maris Hutchinson, Courtesy the artist and Gagosian.
Sze’s intricate collages layer acrylic paint, photo fragments, and digital images. Objects are attached and emerge from the canvas or are placed on the floor next to the work, with the intention of bringing the studio into the painting. The new canvases also contain ridges or sculptural elements – what appears flat is not flat at all. Sze’s work both expresses our current state of visual overload and processes it into her own compelling large canvases and video works.
Over at Sprüth Magers, David Salle — often mentioned as part of the original Pictures Generation — exhibited new works that are also hybrid mashups. In My Frankenstein, Salle has created works in which he paints with, around, and over, images sourced from a proprietary AI of Salle’s own work. The AI is able to suggest juxtapositions Salle never imagined.
Talk Therapy, 2025 Oil, acrylic, flashe and charcoal on archival UV print on linen 36 x 54 inches
Salle’s collaboration with the AI, and at times his own resistance to it, produces works that are filled with bright colors, and many coffee cups. There is a declarative aspect to the works, reminiscent of Soviet Realism. Many of the new works feature women’s torsos but no faces. Salle’s canvases work best when the dialogue between the borrowed and the new results in new insight. It is a case of wanting two plus two to equal five. When they do not, the effect can still be overwhelmingly pleasing but not always satisfying.
Among the dangers of AI is that it both flatters the user but often produces safe choices – Salle’s “My Frankenstein” walks this dangerous line, and as we know from Frankenstein, success does not mean there are no failures.
Taskashi Murakami’s Hark Back to Ukiyo-e: Tracing Superflat to Japonisme’s Genesis is a very meta or irony-filled exhibition. Murakami who Japanese critics have faulted for being too Western, or for borrowing from anime and manga, has now reproduced Japanese works that were the inspiration for Western artists, using very vivid colors and slyly inserting his own characters into the works. After feeling lost and lacking any direction for his work. Murakami was inspired by a visit to Giverny, Monet’s home outside of Paris to create works in dialogue with those that inspired Monet.
Referencing popular masterworks is also a way to appropriate their commercial appeal. Warhol was certainly a master of this. In the past, Murakami has appropriated images from classic Japanese art, manga and even Disney’s Mickey Mouse. Murakami is able to make the past look modern and force us to take a closer look at images we have long taken for granted.
Installation view of Takashi Murakami’s exhibition, Hark Back to Ukiyo-e: Tracing Superflat to Japonisme’s Genesis, at Perrotin Los Angeles, 2026. Photographer: Guillaume Ziccarelli. ©︎Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All Rights Reserved. Courtesy Perrotin.
Today, we are living in a tsunami of images that is overwhelming. We see so much that little stays with us. Sze, Salle and Murakami are just three examples of artists who are part of this new “Images Generation” and who are experimenting, with varying degrees of success, in using images the way an earlier generation used new materials and paint colors. That these exhibitions were all in Los Angeles is no surprise as there is no city more identified with producing images, whether for screens large and small.
Recognizing an Images Generation is also a way to move beyond identity politics as to race, gender, age, sexual orientation, and focus on the matter used to create this art. Under this rubric we can see the works of other contemporary artists from Arthur Jafa to Doug Aitken. We can also look back to artists Bruce Connor, Sherrie Levine, Wallace Berman, and Lynn Hershman Leeson’s, whose works from the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, are newly back in vogue because they used found images to make work that said: “Stop. Look. Pay Attention.”
With the use of AI or in making works from found images, other artworks, or even from one’s own history, today’s artists runs the risk of creating work that is more safe than insightful, more pleasing than challenging, more commercial than groundbreaking.
Yet what matters most is what the artists create from the images that have become the stuff of their work, with or without AI, that force us to consider our past, present and future.
Cover image: David Salle, Birth of Venus, 2025, Oil, acrylic, flashe and charcoal on archival UV print on linen, 182.9 × 233.7 cm | 72 × 92 inches, 194.9 × 245.7 × 7 cm | 76 3/4 × 96 3/4 × 2 3/4 inches (framed) © David Salle/VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY, Courtesy Sprüth Magers; Photo: John Berens
