IFPDA Online Exclusive: Donald Sultan Flowers and Smoke Rings

Donald Sultan in front of his print, Ten Greens March 20 2006

Mary Ryan Gallery is pleased to present a selection of flowers and smoke rings by Donald Sultan (b.1951) for this year’s IFPDA Online Exclusive presentation.

A leading contemporary artist who first rose to prominence in the late 1970s as part of the “New Image” movement, Donald Sultan explores such dichotomies as beauty and roughness, nature and artificiality, and realism and abstraction in his work. He is a master printmaker, having worked in etching, silkscreen, woodcut and lithography, among other techniques. The gallery has been working closely with Sultan since 1991, publishing numerous prints and holding several exhibitions of his work.

Please click here to view the presentation on the IFPDA website through May 28.

Included in this presentation is a selection of the artist’s prints, drawings, and multiples from the past 20 years focusing on the motifs of poppies, freesias, trumpet flowers, mimosas, tulips, and smoke rings. The earliest works included are the Smoke Rings, depicting billowing rings of white smoke that seem to dance on their stark black backgrounds. The most recent work, Mimosa with Red, is a brand new edition inspired by a gift of mimosa blossoms Sultan received from a friend in the South of France. Other highlights included are Sultan’s first Mimosa print that took 2 years to complete, combining etching, aquatint, and silkscreen and published by the gallery, a recent peacefully simple freesia drawing executed in black ink, and his iconic Six Poppies portfolio published in 2011.

Donald Sultan's studio

As written by Suzanne Muchnic for the LA Times, “Sultan’s powers of transformation are the result of medium, scale and style….Sultan obliterates all the particulars, cancels the color and invests the work with sensuous subtleties of printmaking.” Sultan’s flowers and smoke rings presented here exemplify the artist’s continuation and expansion of the still-life, bringing the tradition into the contemporary.