Donald K Sultan was born on 1951 and is an American painter, sculptor, and printmaker, particularly well known for large-scale still life paintings and the use of industrial materials such as tar, enamel, spackle and vinyl tiles.
28 Facts About Donald Sultan
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Donald Sultan has been exhibiting internationally in prominent museums and galleries, and his works are included in important museum collections all over the globe.
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Donald Sultan was born in Asheville, North Carolina in 1951.
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Donald Sultan's father was a tire company owner who painted abstract paintings as a hobby, and his mother, Phyllis actively pursued theatre.
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Donald Sultan soon got a full-time position as a handyman in an art gallery, a job that lasted until the gallery closed in 1978.
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In 1979, Donald Sultan won a $2,500 Creative Artists Public Service Grant from the New York State Council on the Arts, and that money enabled him to work full-time on his art.
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Donald Sultan rose to prominence in the electrified atmosphere of New York's downtown renaissance in the late 1970s as part of the "New Image" movement.
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Donald Sultan seems particularly to love the way an implacable slab of material can be made to flip-flop into a classically perfect, illusionistic form.
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Donald Sultan was represented by a prestigious gallery, some of his paintings were selling for more than $100,000 each.
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Donald Sultan was one of the first to employ a wide range of industrial tools and materials, particularly tar, in lieu of traditional brushes and paints.
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Donald Sultan is best known for his lemons and fruit, and states that his subjects develop from previous work.
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Donald Sultan's images are weighty, with equal emphasis on both negative and positive areas.
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The color often retains the gloss and unnatural lushness of the Polaroid photographs Donald Sultan takes after he decides the still-life arrangement.
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Yet even as his coeval, Julian Schnabel, has cornered plates as a medium, Donald Sultan seems to have been the first to work in tar, combining it with spackle and latex on a ground consisting of vinyl tiles attached to Masonite.
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Donald Sultan is exploring the medium further through techniques of gouging, sanding, and buffing to create flatness, depth, gloss, and texture.
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The format of Donald Sultan's paintings is almost always dictated by the tiles: one-foot squares, eight-foot squares, or most recently, four and eight-foot squares.
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On his graphic work, Donald Sultan was among a small group of influential American artists who frequently collaborated with Picasso's master-printer Aldo Crommelynck.
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Donald Sultan's silhouetted charcoal drawings on paper, as well as his compositions in color conte crayon and flock, often explore the forms of fruits and flowers, resulting in largely monochromatic and prominent images.
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Just like in his paintings, Donald Sultan continues to combine industrial materials in many of his sculptures.
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In 1997, Donald Sultan collaborated with author and artist Michael McKenzie and poet Robert Creeley on the landmark book "Dark Poetics", a hand silkscreened oversized volume featuring dozens of his paintings.
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Donald Sultan has subsequently done a book of prints with the Israel-based print publishers Har-el, and done prints in collaboration with the Benefit Print Project supporting such cultural institutions as the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton, New York, the Atlantic Center for the Arts in New Smyrna Beach, Florida, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, and the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts.
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Since 1977, Donald Sultan has shown work in galleries in France, Japan, the Russian Federation, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States.
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In 1998, Donald Sultan accepted a commission for an Absolut Vodka iconic art ad campaign, which began in the early 1980s when Andy Warhol created Absolut's first commissioned artwork.
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In 1999, Donald Sultan was invited to have a permanent exhibition of his works in various media at the trendy new hotel in Budapest, Hungary that was scheduled to open in the fall of 2000.
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Aptly named Art'otel Budapest Donald Sultan, it was practically turned over to Sultan with a carte blanche to design everything from the fountains, to the carpeting and terry-cloth bathrobes.
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Since 1982, Donald Sultan has been actively participating in various educational institutions' Visiting Artist Programs.
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Donald Sultan has been speaking and teaching regularly at museums and universities on both sides of the Atlantic.
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Donald Sultan spends time between his spacious loft in Tribeca, a historic 1760 house in Sag Harbor, Long Island, which he bought in 1984, and a Paris apartment on the fashionable Rue Marbeuf, just off the Champs Elysees.