Donald Sultan

Donald Sultan is a contemporary painter best known for his use of industrial materials to depict everyday subjects. Sultan uses recurring imagery — mostly flowers, but also dominoes and horses — to create colorful still lifes, combining a Minimalist aesthetic of few colors and geometric shapes.

Sultan was born on May 5, 1951 in Asheville, NC and moved to New York in 1975, becoming a part of the New Image movement along with fellow painters Susan Rothenberg and Julian Schnabel.

New Image Painting is also referred to as New Image Art. It is a vague term made popular in the late 1970's and is highly associated to the artworks of contemporary artists who have a strident figurative style, mostly influenced by Neo-Expressionism. The New Image concept marked the return of the arts to painting after a time when a big part of the works of contemporary artists had been focused on conceptual art, installation, and performance and it has its headquarter in New York City.

In addition to his paintings, Sultan has collaborated with the Pulitzer-prize winning playwright David Mamet on the illustrated novel Bar Mitzvah (1999). He has shown in galleries all over the world, including The Museum of Modern Art in New York, Tate Modern in London, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo.