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.
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.
[1] 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.
[4] 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.
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.
"[8] 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.
[9] 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.
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.
Positive and negative, charred and pristine, ripeness and decay all nestle together..."[13] Sultan's use of industrial materials in this way is striking and innovative, and Vivien Raynor has made this point in The New York Times stating that "Donald Sultan is descended from the Process artists of the late 1960s in that he makes art out of materials that are very much a part of contemporary life.
Yet even as his coeval, Julian Schnabel, has cornered plates as a medium, Sultan seems to have been the first to work in tar, combining it with spackle and latex on a ground consisting of vinyl tiles attached to Masonite.
"[12] It is through the use of these industrial materials, as well as through the deconstruction of his subjects into basic forms, that Sultan's paintings are enriching and elevating the still-life tradition.
"[13] The larger compositions, huge pieces of fruit, flowers, dominoes, buttons and other objects, set against the stark, unsettling tar black, eight foot square background, have a different effect and dominate the viewer.
"[15] Air Strike April 22, 1987 is one of the artist's "Disaster Pictures" that uses Latex and tar on Vinyl composition tile to convey the horrors of the Sri Lankan Civil War.
[17] His large size aquatint etchings are particularly complex technically, and many have been exhibited in museums all over the globe, including in May, 2014, at the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris.
On his graphic work, Sultan was among a small group of influential American artists who frequently collaborated with Picasso's master-printer Aldo Crommelynck.
His silhouetted charcoal drawings on paper, as well as his compositions in color conte crayon and flock, often explore the forms of fruits and flowers, resulting in largely monochromatic and prominent images.
In 1997, Sultan collaborated with author and artist Michael McKenzie and poet Robert Creeley on the landmark book "Dark Poetics", a hand silkscreened oversized volume featuring dozens of his paintings.
Sultan's ad shows a rough square filled with a screenprint of pimiento stuffed green olives, with a black and white aquatint image of the Absolut bottle boldly superimposed over the center of the artwork.
[31] In 1999, Sultan was invited to have a permanent exhibition of his works in various media at the trendy new hotel in Budapest, Hungary that was scheduled to open in the fall of 2000.
"I thought everybody should have a sculpture in their room," Sultan said of his hotel design, "and playful red carpeting with a needle-and-thread motif that supposedly hearkens back to Hungary's history as a tapestry-making capital."
[15] Sultan spends time between his spacious loft in Tribeca, a historic 1760 house in Sag Harbor, Long Island, which he bought in 1984, and a Paris apartment on the fashionable Rue Marbeuf, just off the Champs Elysees.
