Michael Salter

Michael Salter (born 1967) is an American contemporary artist and educator. Salter works in a variety of media, including drawing, painting, digital art, animation, kinetic sculpture, His work often references and subverts the visual language of corporate branding and graphic design, His work has been described as postmodern, whimsical, and thought-provoking. Salter is perhaps best known for his giant Styrobots - a series of site-specific installations which rise ceiling-high to dominate their space. before narrowing his focus to the visual and creative aspect of design. He earned his BFA from Miami University, Oxford, Ohio, with to a double concentration in sculpture and graphic design. He received his MFA in studio art from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. As a member of the artist collective Team Lump, in 1998 he began participating in Lump Gallery group shows, and the images of unpopulated urban or sub-urban landscapes would become recurring motifs in Salter's work, reemerging in three-dimensional and animated forms in Salter's later work. Over time the Styrobots have grown with each successive show, expanding to fill their available space.

Icons From the beginning, Salter's gallery installations have included a variety of stylized images, often referred to as "icons", but perhaps more properly called pictograms.

Installations

Jeff Bailey Gallery Salter has exhibited works in solo and group shows nationally and internationally. This piece and the appropriated oil cans would reappear the next year in the group show Introduction, the inaugural exhibition of the think.21 gallery in Brussels, Belgium.

think.21 Contemporary Gallery In 2009, Salter would install a solo show at think.21, If You Don't Buy It From Us, It's Not Our Problem which included a pensive looking seated Styrobot and the "absurd" figure of a giant singing yellow banana whose pants had fallen to his ankles. The four high definition "digital paintings" were commissioned in 2011 for the opening of the Lithium Project Art Gallery in Napoli, Italy.

From the beginning of his career, Salter has both benefited from and contributed to the success of Team Lump,

Motifs Salter's work is characterized by a response to and a subversion of consumer culture, the ubiquity of corporate branding, and the banality of urban and suburban landscapes. His installations often feature disorienting shifts in scale and surrealistic elements - improbable content that defies literal interpretation.

The artist is also known to have a fondness for puns.

Critical response