Donald Sultan is a painter, printmaker, and sculptor whose semi-abstract artworks merge the reproductive process of printing with the traditional still lifes of Western painting. While his subject matter is softly bucolic, his materials—linoleum, Masonite, spackle, tar, and plaster—are roughly industrial. With personal roots in the manufacturing landscape of Asheville, North Carolina, Sultan began working at an early age in his father’s tire company, building theater sets in school, and later worked in construction in New York after moving to the big city to pursue an art career. All of this led to an interest in industrial reproduction, working with heavy materials, and a practice of working from the floor upwards. With these influences, Sultan closely examines how traditional representations of everyday objects are easily repackaged and abstracted through the lens of the twentieth century capitalist system. 

In this neon green screen-print, Sultan investigates a common artists’ subject—apples. From still life painting of the Northern Renaissance, to the Expressionism of Van Gogh, to the perspectival investigations of Cezanne, to the semiotic experiments of Magritte, the simple apple has formed the core of artistic exploration. Throughout his career Sultan has sought to reinvent still life, using images of lemons, poppies, playing cards, fruits, flowers, and other common objects. In this work, vibrant neon green apples fill the surface, but with no particular light source the circular objects are flattened. A deeply black oval is centered and bears the viewer’s attention due to its unsuitability to traditional still life. In this, Sultan shakes up our expectations of how we view traditional works, with the print more of an exploration of shapes (circular versus oval, flat versus round). A silk-screen may be considered an original artwork—or it may not. The process involves reproduction, but many times, each reproduction is slightly individualized. Unlike well-known artists before him, Sultan does not appropriate his images, but instead creates his own paintings and then reproduces them. Always experimenting with the printing process, Sultan worked with various sorts of printing, of which Public Art owns three different types—a silkscreen, a lithograph, and an iris print. 

Born in Asheville, North Carolina, Sultan studied at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and later received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Sultan’s work belongs in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago; the Museum of Modern Art; the Tate; the Guggenheim Museum; the Whitney Museum of American Art; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC, among others. He has also exhibited in solo and group shows at the British Museum, London (2017); Royal Academy of Arts, London (2017); Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC (2000); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (1988); the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1988); Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (1987); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1987); and the Whitney Museum of American Art (1979), among others. Sultan lives and works in New York City.