Donald Sultan Artist biography
1951 Born in Asheville, NC
1973 BFA from UNC, Chapel Hill
1975 MFA from the School of the Art Institute, Chicago

The Album Series, 1996
Sultan takes a contemporary approach to the very conservative still-life tradition. His Album suite from 1996 includes four works on paper entitled Orange, Butterfly, Button and Eight Ball. In the tradition of Renaissance humanists, Sultan presents numerous cross-sections of each object. Unlike his predecessors, Sultan applies the same detailed scrutiny to both butterflies and balls from a pool table.

The Flowers Series, 1999
In the Flowers series from 1999, Sultan blurs the line between abstraction and realism by increasing scale and intensifying color. The series includes four works on paper, entitled Blue Flowers, Black Flowers, Four Red Flowers, and Six Red Flowers. In these works, huge blossoms fill the paper and explode beyond it, in a typically modern disregard for order and scale. Sultan’s flowers, set on a white background, offer a link between Georgia O’Keefe’s flowers set in nature and Andy Warhol’s large-scale works in series.

Also on View this Summer:
Donald Sultan: In the Still-Life Tradition
Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
May 6 – July 17, 2000

Sultan’s work is included in the following permanent collections:
The Ackland Art Museum, UNC Chapel Hill
Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, Mass.
Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo
The Arkansas Art Center, Little Rock
The Art Institute of Chicago
Art Museum of Southeast Texas, Beaumont
Australian National Gallery, Canberra
Bank America Corporation
Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio
Cincinnati Art Museum
Dallas Museum of Art
Des Moines Art Center
Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.
The High Museum of Art, Atlanta
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Gardens, Smithsonian Institute, Washington D.C.
Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO
Kitakyushu Municipal Museum of Art, Tobataku Kitakyushu, Japan
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
Museum of Modern Art, New York
Nelson-Atkins Museum, Kansas City, MO
Neuberger Museum, State University of New York
North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh
The Saint Louis Art Museum
San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, La Jolla, CA
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton Mass.
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
The Toledo Museum of Art
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis
Whitney Museum of American Art