Donald Sultan

Donald Sultan (born 1951), who studied art at the University of North Carolina,

reduces his subject matter, often fruit and flowers, to their bare outlines and renders them with sharp contours. He has a particular fondness for prints and sculptures.

He reinterprets the classical still life and creates works which, through their degree of abstraction and imposing scale, create strong contrasts between the luminous subject and the background. The intimacy of still-life painting is transformed into powerful plasticity and, through its new appearance and saturated backgrounds, creates a mesmerising visual effect.

In the manner of Pop Art, large-scale and with clearly defined contours, the subjects take on an emblematic quality through their stylisation. Sultan describes the raw pictorial ground as ‘something brutal and beginning’, he then combines non-artistic materials and techniques with the stylistic and iconographic strategies of Pop Art. Flowers, for example, are detached from the tradition of still life and staged on large, square panels through flat, simplified forms and strong contrasts. Sultan operates on the borderline between the abstract and the everyday, combining geometric and organic forms, whilst the visual language appears both monumental and fragile.

Donald Sultan was part of the ‘New Image’ movement in the late 1970s in his adopted home of New York, where he still lives and works today.

His works are held in many international museums and collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo and the Tate Modern in London.