Donald Sultan is a painter, sculptor and engraver known for his large-scale works in which he uses industrial materials to depict everyday objects. In his usual iconography, flowers and fruits stand out, sculpted in colorful still lifes on dark backgrounds; the delicacy and elegance of the representations contrast with the materials he uses: tar, aluminum, enamel or tiles on masonite. The industrial elements create multiple layers of depth with a sense of bas-relief while offering a tangible indication of the work’s taxation. This interest is at the heart of Sultan’s work, which explores the dichotomies of the natural and the artificial, the soft and the rough, or figuration and abstraction.

Donald Sultan’s “Mimosa” paintings were inspired by the gift of a flower he received from a friend in the south of France. Sultan uses the structure of the plant as a basis to explore the space between abstraction and representation, natural and invented. The completely abstracted dots in the work are the “anomalies” mentioned in the title. Sultan uses enamel, graphite, cement and silver spray paint on masonite to create his mimosas, also exploring the boundaries between organic and industrial.

The first paintings in the Mimosa series were created in 2019. The mimosa tree has fern-shaped leaves and flowers that resemble dandelions with their seeds. Donald Sultan first drew pictures of the mimosa blossom and then explored this organic motif in a more abstract way.
This current work of mimosa represents a historical continuity between the New Image Painting movement of the 1970s and her later work. Mimosas are also known as “shameful plants of meaning”. This designation is due to the fact that their leaves withdraw when stimulated.

His latest work can thus be interpreted as an extension of the previous one; the organic elements depicted are compressed in their most basic form in an examination of form reduction. The recurring motifs of still life, such as fruit and flowers, depicted with everyday materials, create a contradiction, a dichotomy, in which the structure of the artwork is heavy, but the images become light at the same time. Therein lies Donald Sultan’s gaze, in the transformation and deconstruction of ordinary organic elements into an abstract expression that creates a material paradox as well as a sensual one.

Donald Sultan – Master of Still Life