[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/salle-e1772740284882.jpg?w=1024″]<\/p>\n
\n\tArtist Kelly Reemtsen filed a copyright lawsuit last month against David Salle, alleging that his 2025 painting Hatchet<\/em>\u2014which first attracted plagiarism allegations in March\u2014copied protected elements from two of her works. The complaint seeks damages, profits from the allegedly infringing work, and an injunction preventing Hatchet<\/em> from being sold or exhibited, while also requesting that the painting either be turned over to Reemtsen or destroyed.<\/p>\n \n\tThe lawsuit, filed June 22 in the US District Court for the Central District of California, alleges that Hatchet <\/em>is \u201cstrikingly similar\u201d to two of Reemtsen\u2019s works: Impact<\/em>, which depicts a woman in a black-and-white striped dress holding a sledgehammer, and It\u2019s All Black and White<\/em>, which similarly depicts a woman in a striped dress brandishing an axe. The complaint says Salle\u2019s 2025 painting shares the works\u2019 pose, perspective, clothing, and overall visual impression, differing chiefly in that its subject holds an axe instead of a sledgehammer.\u00a0<\/p>\n Hatchet <\/em>first appeared publicly in \u201cMy Frankenstein,\u201d a new exhibition of Salle\u2019s work that opened at Spr\u00fcth Magers Los Angeles on February 24. The oil-and-acrylic painting was created, in part, with the aid of artificial intelligence. <\/p>\n \n\tIn recent years, Salle has collaborated with an engineer to develop a generative AI model trained on his own oeuvre. By feeding it curated selections of past works, he prompts the model to generate new image configurations.<\/p>\n \n\tSocial media users were quick to compare the painting to Reemtsen\u2019s Impact (2021), <\/em>with one widely circulated video outright asking: \u201cDid Salle steal this woman\u2019s idea, or is it just harmless appropriation?\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tSpeaking to ARTnews<\/em> via email at the time, dealers Monika\u00a0Spr\u00fcth\u00a0and\u00a0Philomene Magers\u00a0framed that appropriation as a hallmark of Salle\u2019s practice. Salle is a leading figure of the Pictures Generation\u2014a loose cohort of American artists that emerged in the late 1970s and early \u201880s, including Robert Longo, Richard Prince, and Cindy Sherman, who freely scavenged images from mass media to challenge conventional ideas of authorship.<\/p>\n \n\tAccording to the dealers, Salle \u201chas historically borrowed images from popular culture, advertising, art, his own photographs, and other sources to create his own interpretations on canvas, continuing a long tradition of artists drawing from the past and from one another. In turn, his works have been used by other artists without his permission.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tThe dealers added that Salle acknowledged his use of Reemtsen\u2019s image had \u201crestarted a decades-long dialogue about authorship for new audiences\u201d and said Hatchet<\/em> had been removed from view \u201cout of respect to both artists.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tA central piece of Reemtsen\u2019s lawsuit is an email Salle allegedly sent Reemtsen in March, following media coverage of the controversy. In it, he wrote that there had been \u201cinternet chatter\u201d about a painting of his \u201cthat incorporates an image from one of yours,\u201d adding that he had discovered her work online and \u201cadmired it very much.\u201d Reemtsen claims that the email is an admission that Salle copied her work.<\/p>\n \n\tThe complaint further alleges that the controversy \u201cwas both harmful to her existing professional relationships in the art world, and took energy and focus away from her own professional obligations,\u201d adding that the resulting exposure \u201csubstantially and materially harmed her existing relationships with her own clients.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tIn a statement, Reemtsen\u2019s attorney, Matthew Swanlund, described the lawsuit as an effort \u201cto protect the integrity of Kelly Reemtsen\u2019s original artworks and the rights granted to artists under federal copyright law.\u201d Swanlund said Reemtsen \u201ctakes the protection of her rights very seriously\u201d and that litigation became necessary only after the dispute \u201ccould not be resolved in a manner that adequately protected\u201d her artworks and legal rights.<\/p>\n \n\tSalle did not respond to a request for comment by the time of publication. Spr\u00fcth Magers, which is not a defendant in the lawsuit, declined to comment, noting that the lawsuit was still pending.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n [analyse_source url=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/art-news\/news\/david-salle-lawsuit-kelly-reemsten-painting-1234791484\/”]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/salle-e1772740284882.jpg?w=1024″] Artist Kelly Reemtsen filed a copyright lawsuit last month against David Salle, alleging that his 2025 painting Hatchet\u2014which first attracted plagiarism allegations in March\u2014copied protected elements from two of her works. The complaint seeks damages, profits from the allegedly infringing work, and an injunction preventing Hatchet from being sold or exhibited, while […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-2033732","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2033732","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2033732"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2033732\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2033732"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2033732"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2033732"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}