Donald Sultan valuation
Builds still lifes out of tar, plaster and vinyl tile — lemons and poppies made from building materials.
Donald Sultan was born in Asheville, North Carolina in 1951 and came to New York in the mid-1970s.
What a work by Donald Sultan is worth
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation is free, made online from the photographs you send, and it commits you to nothing. We act for sellers across the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States.
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Bio
Donald Sultan was born in Asheville, North Carolina in 1951 and came to New York in the mid-1970s. His method is industrial rather than painterly: masonite panels laid with vinyl floor tile, into which shapes are cut and then filled with plaster, tar, butyl rubber and spackle before any colour is applied. What emerges from that construction is a still life — lemons, poppies, dominoes, buttons, smokestacks, black eggs — rendered as flat silhouettes at large scale. The Disaster Paintings of the 1980s, of fires and industrial accidents, are the darkest part of the output.
The tile-and-tar paintings are physically unusual and their condition needs a properly informed eye: the panels are heavy, the tar remains slightly soft and attracts dirt, and the layered materials can delaminate — none of which is straightforward to conserve. The Disaster Paintings lead the market. Sultan is also a prolific printmaker in aquatint, screenprint and woodblock, frequently with flocking or tar-like surfaces applied over the printed image, in editions of around forty to a hundred and fifty, and these are the accessible part of the output.
Chicago, Artists Space and the New Image painters
Sultan took his MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and moved to New York in 1975, at first helping other artists build their lofts by day and painting at night. His first solo exhibition was at Artists Space in New York in 1977, and he rose with the New Image painters of the late 1970s; the Museum of Modern Art showed his work in 1981.
His panels begin as twelve-inch vinyl floor tiles glued to Masonite or plywood, so the joins between tiles are part of the construction, and photographs of the edges and the back of a panel are as useful to a valuation as the front.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
