Donald Sultan: Flowers

October 1 – October 31, 2026

Mary Ryan Gallery is pleased to announce Flowers, showcasing drawings, prints, and two small sculptures by Donald Sultan (b. 1951 Asheville, NC). A master of a variety of mediums, works on view in this exhibition incorporate charcoal, silkscreen, flocking, woodcut, gouache, gold leaf, and conté, among others.

The exhibition opens in tandem with the new monograph Donald Sultan: Flowers, which will be published by Rizzoli in November 2026. Essays by Susan Tallman and Edith Devaney delve deep into the artist’s practice and illuminate his work as never before.

Sultan has returned to the subject of flowers repeatedly over the years, depicting tulips, sunflowers, mimosas, lantern flowers, poppies, and freesia. The earliest work in the show, Black Tulip June 26 1983, borrows its unexpected color from his iconic Black Lemons series in which he eliminates the flower’s bright color in favor of simplicity and texture. The most recent work is two sets of Double Poppies silkscreens, in pink and white.

Incorporating handmade paper, paper pulp, and flocking, Five Blue Flowers with Flocked Center, March 10, 2002 is a marvel of texture, pattern, and bold color. The blue poppies nearly transform into abstracted shapes, anchored by their black centers. The black and white woodcut motif fills the negative space between the petals.

The sculpture White Tulips and Vase, April 4, 2014 is simultaneously organic and geometric, making powerful use of both negative and positive space. A master of the meaningful line, Sultan draws attention to the ineffable elegance of the oval-blossomed flowers as they gracefully arch down to the base. The artist keeps one of his Tulips sculptures on his own kitchen table and says, “I love these tulips. I never have to water them.”

Susan Tallman writes in the monograph, “The flowers that interested him were not plucked in wilderness, they were commodities shaped over centuries to accommodate human tastes and maximize economies of scale. His preferred materials and methods have always blended the mass-produced and the manual. Printmaking suits him because it wears its industrial pedigree on its sleeve, but it’s the artist’s hand that extends from the cuff.”

Sultan’s flowers range from delicate to bold, from fuzzy softness to sharp edges, from precise detail to nearly abstract forms. The artist says, “I try to pare down the images to their essence, and capture the fleeting aspect of reality by pitting the gesture against the geometric—the gesture being the fluidity of the human against the geometry of the object.”

Donald Sultan (b. 1951 Asheville, NC) is an artist who rose to prominence in the late 1970s as part of the “New Image” movement. Sultan has challenged the boundaries between painting and sculpture throughout his career. Intrigued by contrasts, he explores dichotomies of beauty and roughness, nature and artificiality, and realism and abstraction.

His first solo exhibition was mounted in 1977 at Artists Space in New York. He has since exhibited worldwide in landmark solo and group exhibitions. In 2025, the solo exhibition From Painting to Print: The Poppies, Mimosas, and Lantern Flowers of Donald Sultan opened at American University Museum – Katzen Arts Center in Washington, DC. In 2016, a major solo exhibition of Sultan’s Disaster Paintings began a two-year tour of five American museums through 2018. Organized by Dr. Marla Price, the exhibition originated at the Lowe Art Museum at the University of Miami, FL and traveled to the Museum of Modern Art, Fort Worth, TX; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, NC; and Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln, NE.

His work is included in the collections of the Addison Gallery of American Art, MA; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, NY; Art Institute of Chicago, IL; Bank of America Collection; British Museum, London; Cleveland Art Museum, OH; Denver Art Museum, CO; Detroit Institute of Arts, MI; Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University, MA; High Museum of Art, GA; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Ludwig Museum, Budapest; Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, TX; Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, CA; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Museum of Modern Art, NY; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Nelson-Atkins Museum, MO; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, PA; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; Singapore Museum of Art, Singapore; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY; St. Louis Art Museum, MO; Tate Gallery, London; Toledo Museum of Art, OH; Walker Art Center, MN; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY.