Donald Sultan

Donald Sultan (b. 1951, Asheville, United States, based in New York, United States) explores ideas around representation, visual culture and the built environment through painting, printmaking and sculpture. Rendered in a lyrical, graphic style, his work combines simple organic forms with the monumental presence of industrial materials, giving them a distinct texture and dynamic interplay between positive and negative space.

Spending his early schooling years building theatre sets and working in his father’s tire company, Sultan gained an interest in industrial reproduction methods and materials that would shape his artistic development. His visual language found resonance with the New Image movement of 1970s New York, characterised by bold figurative styles that steered away from pure abstraction. Sultan’s signature method involves cutting forms into vinyl tiles laid onto masonite, filling negative spaces with tar or plaster, and layering the image with paint. Demonstrated in his Disaster Paintings (1983–1991) series, which depict industrial-like structures being overcome by catastrophes, as well as his ‘still-life’ compositions of flora and fruit pared down to their essential forms , this technique contrasts the weight of the materials used with the fragility of the artist’s subject matter.

Sultan obtained his BFA from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill in 1973 and his MFA from the Art Institute of Chicago in 1975. His works are held in major collections including the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; British Museum, London; Cleveland Art Museum; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Singapore Art Museum; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Tate, London; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Notable exhibitions include Beyond the Surface (2024), Leepa-Rattner Museum of Art, St. Petersburg; Framing Nature’s Paradox (2023), Morris Museum, Morristown; Tensile Strength (2022), Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City; Art of Food (2022), Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, Portland; Art of Food (2022), Asheville Art Museum; The American Dream (2017), British Museum, London; Disaster Paintings (2016), Lowe Art Museum, Coral Gables; Disaster Paintings (2016), Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth; and Disaster Paintings (2016), Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.

Sultan had his residency at the STPI Workshop in 2002, resulting in the exhibition Prints and Drawings (2004).