Donald Sultan – Master of Mediums

Hungary, Budapest, Art’otel, hotel designed by artist Donald Sultan, restaurant

“My father was a physical person…I just felt most comfortable making things and moving things. Part of the whole American experience I came out of was the empire building mentality… physical labor. My grandfather was on the assembly lines of Detroit in the Depression. It was the way it was.” – Donald Sultan

The legendary Studio 54’s late co-founder Steve Rubell astutely remarked in 1985, “…artists [were] becoming the stars of the 1980s, like the rock stars of the 1960s or the fashion designers of the 1970s,” and artist Donald Sultan was fully riding this wave as his works were in high demand and commanding high prices.

Today, we explore the many different aspects of Donald Sultan and how his unique perspective has captured the imagination of art lovers around the world.

Born in 1951 in Asheville, North Carolina, Donald Sultan grew up with parents who loved the arts. His father, owner of a tire company, loved to create abstract paintings in his free time and his mother loved theater. Donald acted in theater, then found he loved creating and painting sets. Art and construction were in his nature. He soon received his MFA from the Art Institute of Chicago, where he began to experiment with industrial tools and mediums and non-traditional painting techniques.

Known as part of the “New Image” movement, and a principal contemporary artist who came into recognition in the 1970s, Donald Sultan dives deep into such contrasts as light vs. darkness, grace vs. brutality, actuality vs. abstraction, and organic vs. synthetic in his work.

He is also well known for his prints and sculptures, which embrace the same motifs as his paintings. He is a master of multiple mediums, from painting, etching, silkscreen, woodcut, lithography and sculpture among other art techniques and non-traditional industrial media such as plaster, spackle, tar, Masonite, vinyl floor tiles, latex, rubber, PVC and metals.

According to the British art historian and author Ian Dunlop, Sultan’s paintings, “fall into two groups: the first group consists of bold, brightly colored pictures with well-defined shapes and crisp outlines forming a clear silhouette; the second group consists of dark, hard to read pictures full of menace and often inspired by disastrous industrial events such as warehouse fires, airplane crashes, and freight train derailments. In both cases the pictures make a strong, immediate visual statement.”

Donald Sultan has us