Donald Sultan
Five Blues, 2008
Silkscreen
58 x 58 inches
Gift of the Bowler-MacElroy Family
Born in Asheville, North Carolina in 1951, Donald Sultan received a BFA from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute in Chicago. Since his first one-man show in 1977, he has enjoyed a distinguished career as painter, printmaker, and sculptor. His extensive body of work and ability to successfully merge the best of yesterday's artistic tradition with a fresh, modern approach have placed him at the forefront of contemporary art.
Sultan's work has been featured in numerous solo exhibitions in Barcelona, Budapest, Dusseldorf, London, Nagoya, Paris, Rome, Tokyo and Zurich and included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and many other prestigious institutions.
About Five Blues, 2008
Critically-acclaimed New York painter Donald Sultan is best known for his large-scale compositions of flowers, fruit, dominoes and other objects, set against a dark, tar-black background. "From the grit of tar, a svelte surface is built, and the forms themselves, so reliant on black to set them off, have a purchase on elegance that resides in the simplicity and flatness of the shapes," writes Steven Henry Madoff, contributing editor of Art News.
Although his paintings fit into the criteria of still life, Sultan describes these works as first and foremost abstract. "My paintings are not really so much about walnuts (or lemons, etc.) as they are about working on the image, making it look like the thing so much that it's abstracted."
Five Blues can be viewed in the Lavine Family Dining Pavilion, Yawkey Center for Cancer Care, Level 3.