Donald Sultan “New Paintings”

RYAN LEE

[Image: Donald Sultan "Button Down Modernism Coup De Ville Sept 15 2016" (2016)]

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RYAN LEE presents Donald Sultan: New Paintings, an exhibition of work made in the last two years. Sultan, who first rose to prominence during the 1980s, has challenged the boundaries between painting and sculpture throughout his career. Using industrial materials such as roofing tar, aluminum, linoleum and enamel, Sultan layers, gouges, sands and constructs his paintings — sumptuous, richly textured compositions often made of the same materials as the rooms in which they are displayed. This is Sultan’s second solo painting exhibition at RYAN LEE.

In this new series of paintings, Sultan expands his exploration of the industrialization of nature, interrogating the transformation of natural elements such as fruit and flowers into iconography for consumption, whether as fine art or manufactured goods. The image of a “button poppy”— a hybrid shape that melds the plastic button and remembrance poppy motifs developed by Sultan in works from the late 1990s through the mid-2000s — appears throughout the exhibition. Rendered in slick monochrome enamel, the button poppies appear highly plastic, heightening the synthetic quality of the form itself, and suggesting its relationship to the world of manufactured goods.