Donald Sultan
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. 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.
If you own a work by Donald Sultan
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