Donald Sultan is a painter, sculptor, and printmaker who is known for his inclusion in the New Image movement within 1970s New York City. The movement involved a group of artists who employed a figurative style rendered in cartoon-like imagery, with a strong debt to  Neo-Expressionism. In a photographic series titled Smoke Rings, created in the 1990s, Sultan explores photography and printmaking through the aesthetic lens of a painter. The atmospheric and hazy smoke rings closely resemble painterly brushstrokes–minus the paint and brush. The photograph is an examination of basic form with a sensual overlay. Sultan had earlier created prints of smoke rings that he made with a light aquatint, but he went on to produce more copies of these photographs.   

The Smoke Rings series was ongoing for many years, from the 90s until early 2000s. This series of black and white photographs are taken (and dated) on different days, producing works that are highly similar yet never the same. The ephemeral gossamer shapes of the smoke rings appear like swirling cosmos or ghosts. On the large border to the left of the image is a thin cursive writing that repeats the title, with the date, and the artist’s initials. This reproduction is an iris print, an early version of inkjet printing that was popular in the 1990s, as it created high quality images on many different types of paper. As an accomplished printer, Sultan was featured in the 2017 exhibit from the British Museum titled The American Dream: Pop to Present, which featured many established printmakers working from the 1960s and onward. 

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.