Forever Cool Painting

Using an appealing Pop palate, Kadie Salfi depicts objects of depredation, destruction, and desire. From her early silkscreens of bubblegum-hued bomber planes to her series of Arabian camels printed on brightly dyed plaster with pure crude oil, Salfi presents trenchant social and personal commentary with a sly stylishness. Throughout the 2010s, she put American gun culture in the crosshairs: trophy species were rendered in Ben-Day dots and various models of firearms were painted with lustrous splashes of over-the-counter beauty products and captioned with unsettling statements of provenance or prophecy: “To kill his wife” or “To kill your daughter.” This ongoing project culminated in Every Sixteen Hours, a solo show at Brooklyn’s pioneering A.I.R. Gallery, after which Salfi reached back into her own family remembrances to create Sweet Tender Love, her most personal—and yet her most broadly resonant—series of work to date. Born in Burlington, Vermont in 1972, Salfi studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and spent two years at Gemini G.E.L. in Los Angeles, where she printed editions of original graphics for such contemporary masters as Rauschenberg, Celmins, and Johns. Salfi maintains a steady studio practice in Ithaca, New York and has held numerous solo exhibitions on both coasts, including A.I.R. Gallery (Brooklyn), The Ink Shop (Ithaca), Mark Wolfe Contemporary Art (San Francisco), and BCA Center (Burlington). Her work has been discussed in Of Note Magazine, The Cornell Daily Sun, Chapter89 Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, and Artscope.