Donald Sultan

 

 

 

Apples and Oranges, 1987

silkscreen on Arches 88 paper

20.5 x 20.5 in. (52.07 x 52.07 cm)

NEA Purchase

© Donald Sultan

 

 

 

Donald Sultan (American, b. 1951)

The year Donald Sultan was 28—barely four years after receiving his M.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago—his work was selected for the Whitney Museum of American Art’s 1979 Biennial Exhibition. The moment predicted his rapid rise to fame in the 1980s, a period during which Sultan became known for his dramatic, only hintingly figurative representations of lemons, tulips, factory profiles, sail triangles, and other abstractions from nature that were both ambiguous and coolly elegant. While his latex or oil-with-tar on vinyl tile paintings presented these images on a grand scale (typically 96 inches square)—with texture so rich it is impossible not to want to reach out to touch them—at the opposite end of the scale, Sultan is also a consummate printmaker. If sumptuous texture characterized the paintings, rich, ethereal aquatint blacks generated the same charged atmosphere in his prints. In 1987, when the University Art Museum presented the mini-retrospective Centric 24: Donald Sultan Prints 1979–1985 (drawn from an exhibition organized by Ceil Friedman and the Barbara Krakow Gallery, Boston), the artist’s work had not been seen in a solo show in southern California. At that time the Museum acquired two prints by the artist, Yellow Iris, 1982, and Apples and Oranges.