Like a Ghost

Playing beneath the sheets is an activity with connotations both childlike and adult, of Saturday morning cartoons and Sunday morning sex. David Salle’s Ghost Paintings, a series of 14 photographs printed on dyed linen, brings to mind both leisure activities. Featuring the painter’s longtime model, the dancer and performer Beverly Eaby, contorting beneath a rumpled white sheet, these pieces—made in 1992, and recently unearthed—feel alternately erotic and playfully spooky.

“Ghost Paintings” runs through December 21, 2013, at Skarstedt Gallery, 20 East 79th Street in New York.