Mary Ryan Gallery is pleased to announce Soot and Shine an exhibition of new work by Donald Sultan.  This is Sultan's sixth solo show with Mary Ryan Gallery.  This exhibition includes eight new paintings and two drawings with an emphasis on the richness and versatility of black. Donald Sultan is known for combining simplified imagery and complex techniques to reinvent painting. Working with such uncharacteristic materials such as roofing tar and floor tiles, Sultan pushes the boundaries of painting; he gouges, excavates, and spackles his imagery into works that are both sumptuous and spare.  Soot and Shine emphasizes the paradoxical nature of Sultan's work in concept, subject and substance.  Soot is tar and charcoal-- the smoke from the cigarette paintings.  Shine is the French polished surfaced of synthetic flowers, and the sliver of linoleum tile denoting the cigarette.

In his essay, Note on Black from the 2008 publication Donald Sultan, The Theater of the Object, John B. Ravenal writes, "Black lends to Sultan's work clarity, authority, and elegance...Sultan's black also has a shifting quality: variously figure and field, mass and void, presence and absence. It's brooding elegance, moreover, grounds his work in both the history of art and in the everyday world."  In Liquid Blacks Dec. 15 2010, Sultan uses tar and enamel, buffing and sanding, to create a mostly black on black image that is both rough and slick. The flowers and swirling vines that are the subject of this and other paintings are taken not from nature, but from patterns on cheap, mass-produced Chinese lanterns. 

This exploration continues in the Trumpet Flower drawings on view.  The thick build up of charcoal that Sultan uses to render his trumpet flowers, seen head-on, gives solidity and weight to something otherwise fragile.  The saturation of black and abstraction of the blossom seems to mechanize the flowers--so much that they begin to resemble propellers.  Sultan's work, simultaneously elegant and brutal, reveals the essence of his subjects as well as his materials.

For more information please contact Jordan Karney at 212.397.0669 or jordan@maryryangallery.com
 

Donald Sultan was born in 1951 in Asheville, North Carolina.  He lives and works in New York City and Sag Harbor, New York. After receiving his BFA from University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Sultan attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where he earned his MFA. In 2010 Sultan received the distinguished North Carolina Award, the highest honor awarded by the state. He has exhibited all over the world, including solo exhibitions at the Fort Worth Museum of Art, TX, the Los Angeles Country Museum of Art, CA, the Museum of Modern Art, NY and most recently  "Donald Sultan: the First Decade," at the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center, OH. His art is in the permanent collections of over 50 institutions, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Tate Gallery, London.  In 2008 Donald Sultan, The Theater of the Object, a monograph, was published by the Vendome Press, New York, which includes essays by Carter Radcliff and John B. Ravenal.