Donald Sultan, Four Lemons suite, 2018, screenprint with enamel inks on museum board, edition HC 5/5, 39 × 39 inches each, publisher: Lococo Fine Art Publisher, St. Louis, MO. Gift of the Artist, 2019.18.01-04. © Donald Sultan / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY, image courtesy Lococo Fine Art Publisher, St. Louis, MO. According to noted art critic Barbara Rose: “Donald Sultan is one of the most respected as well as one of the more controversial contemporary American painters.” Sultan takes familiar objects such as flowers (like Big Yellow Poppies on our rooftop terrace!), fruits, playing cards, and factory sites, and reduces them to simple but expressive patterns.
As an institution focusing on national and regional American art, Donald Sultan straddles both categories. Born in Asheville, he then went on to study locally and nationally before establishing himself in New York City, where he resides today. The suite of lemon prints is typical of his renderings of everyday objects, wherein he uses color and bold form to abstract the familiar as well as repetitiveness to at once create and dissolve meaning.
