Donald Sultan

Donald K. Sultan (born 1951) is an American painter, sculptor, and printmaker, particularly well known for large-scale still life paintings and the use of industrial materials such as tar, enamel, spackle and vinyl tiles.

He has been exhibiting internationally in prominent museums and galleries, and his works are included in important museum collections all over the globe.

Sultan is the recipient of numerous honors and awards for his artistic achievements.

Donald Sultan was born in Asheville, North Carolina in 1951.

Both of his parents were interested in the arts.

His father was a tire company owner who painted abstract paintings as a hobby, and his mother, Phyllis actively pursued theatre.

It was through his mother that Sultan developed an early interest in theatre.

"I was acting and then I learned how to make theatrical sets and paint them," he recalled, "I did apprenticeships in different professional theaters."

Donald Sultan rose to prominence in the electrified atmosphere of New York's downtown renaissance in the late 1970s as part of the "New Image" movement.

With his father's encouragement, however, Sultan chose to pursue art professionally, and he earned a BFA degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1973 and an MFA from the Art Institute of Chicago in 1975.

While still in school, Sultan grew dissatisfied with traditional methods of painting and began experimenting in technique, surface, and media, which eventually led him to use industrial tools and materials.

After receiving an MFA degree from the Art Institute of Chicago, Donald Sultan moved to New York in 1975 to begin his career as an artist.

At first he was supporting himself by helping other artists construct lofts during the day and painting at night.

His first solo exhibition was mounted in 1977 at Artists Space in New York, followed by group shows at Mary Boone Gallery in 1978 and Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1979.

He soon got a full-time position as a handyman in an art gallery, a job that lasted until the gallery closed in 1978.

In 1979, Sultan won a $2,500 Creative Artists Public Service Grant from the New York State Council on the Arts, and that money enabled him to work full-time on his art.

"By then I had started to show at a couple of places and to sell enough work to keep going," he said.

"In the late 1980s", writes Geraldine Fabricant in The New York Times, "Donald Sultan was riding high. He was represented by a prestigious gallery, some of his paintings were selling for more than $100,000 each."

These paintings, explains the British art historian and author Ian Dunlop, "fall into two groups: the first group consists of bold, brightly colored pictures with well-defined shapes and crisp outlines forming a clear silhouette; the second group consists of dark, hard to read pictures full of menace and often inspired by disastrous industrial events such as warehouse fires, airplane crashes, and freight train derailments. In both cases the pictures make a strong, immediate visual statement."

Sultan was one of the first to employ a wide range of industrial tools and materials, particularly tar, in lieu of traditional brushes and paints.

"Out of industrial materials such as vinyl tile, butyl robber, and spackling plaster Sultan builds pictures that release pleasing vibrations in the mind and the eye," notes Calvin Tomkins in The New Yorker.

Sultan's frequent use of tar was influenced by his father's tire business, and his interest in the industrial world came from his formative years at the Art Institute of Chicago.

"Donald Sultan continues to stretch the technical possibilities of his medium," observes Michael Brenson in The New York Times.

"His images are fresh and direct in part because he approaches industrial materials as if they were tubes of paint, feeling free to use anything as long as he uses it directly, in the form in which he finds it."

In that regard, Sultan said that he "felt more comfortable working with the materials."

"My father was a physical person", he explained, "I just felt most comfortable making things and moving things. Part of the whole American experience I came out of was the empire building mentality — physical labor. My grandfather was on the assembly lines of Detroit in the Depression. It was the way it was."

Sultan's imagery was simultaneously abstract and representational, and as he was exploring the boundary between the abstract and the everyday, he moved from the industrial subjects to the natural world, creating paintings and drawings of fruits and flowers – lemons and tulips, pomegranates and poppies.

Of these works, art critic Vivien Raynor wrote in The New York Times, "Beneath these curmudgeonly surfaces there beats a romantic sensibility that is profoundly stirred by nature."

Although Sultan's subject matter varies, his still lifes share formal similarities of volume, texture and richness.

He is best known for his lemons and fruit, and states that his subjects develop from previous work.

The oval of his lemons has led to a series of oval-blossomed tulips.

Dots from dice have become oranges.

What does not change is the statement Sultan's images make.

His work incorporates basic geometric and organic forms with a visual purity that is both subtle and monumental.

His images are weighty, with equal emphasis on both negative and positive areas.

Sultan's still lifes are studies in contrast.

As Sultan's work started to attract media attention and receive critical acclaim, prominent galleries and museums around the world such as the Indianapolis Museum of Art and the New York Museum of Modern Art in 1981, and the Houston Museum of Contemporary Art also in 1981, began to include his paintings in their exhibitions.

As Studio 54's co-founder Steve Rubell famously observed in 1985, "artists [were] becoming the stars of the 1980s, like the rock stars of the 1960s or the fashion designers of the 1970s," and this astute observation fully applied to Sultan.

In 1987 alone, impressive solo exhibitions were mounted at the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Blum Helman Gallery in New York.

Reviewing these exhibitions for The New York Times, art critic Roberta Smith wrote, "Mr. Sultan is nothing if not a master of physical density, of the well-built image and the well-carpentered painting. He seems particularly to love the way an implacable slab of material can be made to flip-flop into a classically perfect, illusionistic form..."