McClain Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of Donald Sultan: NEW WORKS, featuring a selection of paintings and drawings that are a continuation of Sultan’s ongoing investigation of abstraction using the aesthetic structure of the mimosa tree in bloom. Inspired by the plants found in the French Riviera, this body of work highlights the artist’s innovative use of materials. This is the first solo exhibition of Sultan’s works at McClain Gallery and comes after a ten year absence in Houston. 

Donald Sultan has a decades-long history of exhibiting in Houston with ten shows at the legendary Meredith Long Gallery. Meredith Long is recognized as one of Texas’ most iconic art dealers and part of a significant chapter of Houston art history. Long represented Sultan’s work throughout his career, and showed many of his early works such as his large-format, densely rendered charcoal drawings of eggs and lemons. These early works on paper relate to the abstracted still lifes created with highly textured, innovative media such as tar and plaster for which Sultan is most known.

In the painting Blue and Black Mimosa Dec 2, 2022, Sultan explores his long-standing interest in reducing recognizable imagery to simple shapes. The non-objective nature of abstraction is applied to figuration as a filter that essentializes the object into simple geometry and graphic impact. In this painting, the artist removes the mimosa blossom from its branches and places it against a stark white background. The disentangled deep blue and stark white blooms are depicted as layered circles which contrast sharply with the tar-black foliage. The circles bob along a flow of dark leaves, reminiscent of the movement of wind through trees, calling back to natural processes through the meticulous application of industrial materials.

Color plays a prominent role in Pink Mimosa November 21, 2023. In this work, Sultan combines rich salmon pink and silver mimosa flowers with four planes of leaf forms. The matte gray leaves – made of smoothly applied cement – provide a collage-like surface because of their dimensional edges. The rough texture of this two panel painting on masonite causes the viewer to oscillate between contemplating the beauty of the natural world and considering the corporality of the medium. Sultan’s signature use of industrial materials and minimalist shapes paired with vivid color and delicate, precise line drawings creates a lyrical balance between the easily recognizable imagery of the natural world and the anonymity of abstraction. Rough textures tense up against organic subjects; thus the viewer accesses the sublime position of swaying between sensing, feeling, and thinking.

Donald Sultan (b. 1951 Asheville, NC) is an artist who rose to prominence in the late 1970s as part of the “New Image” movement. Sultan 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. Intrigued by contrasts, he explores dichotomies of beauty and roughness, nature and artificiality, and realism and abstraction. Weighty and structured, Sultan’s works are simultaneously abstract and representational: his imagery is immediately recognizable— flowers, daily objects, idle factories—but ultimately reduced to simple geometric and organic shapes. As Sultan says, “I try to pare down the images to their essence, and capture the fleeting aspect of reality by pitting the gesture against the geometric—the gesture being the fluidity of the human against the geometry of the object.”

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