Donald Sultan

Donald Sultan born in Asheville, North Carolina in 1951, has had a long and successful career as an artist.

 

His artistic training began at the University of North Carolina where he earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree, followed by studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where he completed his Master of Fine Arts. After concluding his formal education in 1975, he moved to New York, where he still lives and works today. In addition to these two degrees, Sultan has been awarded three honorary doctorates over the course of his career, as well as the coveted North Carolina Award, the highest civilian award bestowed by the state where he grew up.

 

Sultan‘s artistic oeuvre is characterised by a connection to classical traditions renowned from art history, which he translates again and again into a contemporary approach in a fresh, innovative style. Over the years, this has led to his unique, unmistakable artistic signature.

 

Donald Sultan‘s intensive engagement with the still life began in the 1980s – a genre in whose grip he remains to this day. Originally inspired by the painting Le Citron, a work from 1880/81 by the impressionist Édouard Manet, he created the series Black Lemons. The Museum of Modern Art in New York presented this series in a solo exhibition in 1988, making Donald Sultan – just 37 years old at the time – one of the youngest artists to whom MoMa ever dedicated a solo exhibition.

 

From then on, he approached the still life in a variety of series, such as Mimosas, Lantern Flowers, Poppies, and Button Flowers. In none of these series did Sultan stick to just a single medium, though, working instead not only as a painter, but also as a sculptor. However, in all these different media he was in pursuit of the same imagery, presenting his objects in a characteristically reduced form, whereby the images are by no means intended to be realistic representations of the various flowers. Rather, the blossoms surrender their actual dimensions and are translated into a two-dimensional, industrial almost abstract, form.

 

Sultan consciously underscores how artificial natural products can seem in today‘s technological age and how incredibly quickly they multiply. He further underlines this theme by making use of industrial materials in his paintings, such as spackle, tar, or linoleum. In his current works, the artist has expanded his repertoire of typical industrial materials to include silver and cement.

 

Works by Donald Sultan can be found in the collections of many of the most prestigious museums in the world, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Tate Gallery in London, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo – amongst others. His artwork can also be found in many private and distinguished collections.

 

Donald Sultan lives and works in New York.