Donald Sultan: Four Decades of Painting

Serge Sorokko Gallery is pleased to present Donald Sultan: Four Decades of Painting, a retrospective exhibition of paintings and works on paper by internationally renowned artist, Donald Sultan. This remarkable collection consists of recent as well as extraordinary earlier works and features an important, never-before-exhibited painting from the artist's celebrated 1980s Disaster Paintings series.

According to Sultan, who spoke about the Disaster Paintings during their 2016 - 2018 five-museum national tour, "The thing that drives great painting is paradox...The structure of the painting is made out of materials that a building is made out of, and the surface is fragile and melted. So there's a paradox inherently built into the painting. Same with the flowers. You have the paradox of a vase and flowers because a vase you can use over and over again but flowers you cannot."

Donald Sultan rose to prominence in the late 1970s as part of the "New Image" movement. He is known for elevating the still-life tradition through the deconstruction of his subjects into basic forms and the use of industrial materials. His paintings characteristically employ enamel, roofing tar, aluminum, linoleum, and spackle, pushing the boundaries of the medium through techniques of gouging, sanding, and buffing to create flatness, depth, and texture. The works are made of the same materials as the building in which the viewer stands; the architecture participates in the paintings. Weighty and structured, Sultan's paintings are simultaneously abstract and representational: while his imagery is immediately recognizable - flowers, daily objects, insignia, idle factories - the dominating, abstract forms contradict its common association with fragility.

Sultan has exhibited extensively, both nationally and internationally. He has had solo exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum; Contemporary Arts Museum Houston; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, to name only a few.

Sultan's works are now held in the permanent collections of over 50 major international museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Metropolitan Museum, New York; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo; the Reina Sofia in Madrid; the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; and Tate Modern, London.

The Disaster Paintings are in many prominent public collections, including the Broad Museum, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Cincinnati Art Museum; Cleveland Museum of Art; Minnesota Museum of American Art, St. Paul; Dallas Museum of Art; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Wash-ington, DC; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh; De Moines Art Center; and Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, New York.

Donald Sultan was born in 1951 in Asheville, North Carolina, and lives and works in New York. He received a BFA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1973 and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1975.