Donald Sultan is known for his prominent abstract and monochromatic flower paintings, which utilize the visual play between positive and negative space. Using industrial materials, ambiguous scale, and bold coloration, Sultan creates a strong contrast between how an object is looked at and the object itself. By reducing ordinarily recognizable subject matter to basic geometric or organic shapes, he explores the dichotomies of beauty and roughness, nature and artificiality, and realism and abstraction. Sultan’s flowers float and cluster together, pushing the edges of the paper. They demand their viewer’s attention.
“I try to pare down the images to their essence, and capture the fleeting aspect of reality by pitting the gesture against the geometric—the gesture being the fluidity of the human against the geometry of the object.” -Donald Sultan
Sultan was born in Asheville, North Carolina in 1951 and is currently based in New York City. He received his BFA from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His work has been featured in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Art in America, and several catalogs, in addition to being included in several public collections such as The Art Institute of Chicago, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, The Metropolitan Museum of Art,
The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MoMA, and The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.
