For more than sixty years Alex Katz has remained dedicated to figurative art in his paintings, sculptures, and works on paper, despite the influence—and, at times, dominance—of abstraction since the postwar era. In 1957 Katz met Ada Del Moro; they married the following year, and she became one of the most frequent subjects of his paintings. Their relationship began during a period of artistic transition for Katz following several years of making small- scale collages. He has recalled how he came to abandon these works for what would become his signature painting style: “I said that if I enlarged them to six feet then I could be very successful, but it was much more interesting to try to paint a contemporary portrait.”

Prior to beginning the large-scale work The Red Smile, Katz made several preparatory drawings as well as smaller versions of the painting. This drafting process and its results recall the work of the Old Masters of Renaissance and Baroque art rather than the spontaneous, abstract compositions of many of Katz’s peers. As Katz himself has explained, he also shares with his fifteenth- and sixteenth-century artistic predecessors a desire to “search for beauty” in the visible world around him.

Evocative of a billboard advertisement or a film still, The Red Smile is a tightly cropped portrait of the head and shoulders of Ada, clad in a white shirt and blue headscarf. Her broadly smiling profile fills half of the horizontally oriented composition. With her distinctive fair skin and dark hair and eyebrows, she is as recognizable across Katz’s many paintings of her as are his signature expanses of flat, crisply delineated color.

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.”

Sultan’s early experiences building theatre sets at school, working in his father’s tire company in Asheville, and later in construction as a young artist in New York had a profound influence on his artistic development. These various lines of work led to an interest in industrial reproduction, heavy materials, and a practice of painting on floors and walls, à la Jackson Pollock. Sultan’s works, constructed horizontally, denote a purposely flat quality that borrows the synthetic flatness of stage sets while also utilizing the monumental weightiness of industrial materials—which harkens back to Asheville’s strong roots in manufacturing.

Interested in the artifice of nature as it is sold and packaged within a consumerist society, a major theme within Sultan’s work is studying the representation of an object or idea—how a flower, a factory, or a fruit is consumed in the Zeitgeist of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In the 1980s, Sultan began depicting lemons in the style of traditional still lifes. The blinding brightness of the yellow against the pitch black hue of the roofing tar he used as background make Sultan’s interpretations of these fruits hard to look at, while deferring monumental dignity to the common household good. The contrast of these natural organic shapes against the industrial materials and grid format has led Sultan to describe these works as pieces with “heavy structure, holding fragile meaning.” Playing with the dichotomy of meaning and material, perception and reality, the Lemon works began Sultan’s longstanding interest in depicting how an object is looked at, rather than the object itself.

His 1990s series on dominos and dice continue this reflection on the still life—the ultimate, slow, and concentrated gaze upon an object. A style entrenched in repetition and tradition, the repertoire of this style is ultimately limited, but the combinations endless. In his compositions of back dots and mathematically endless arrangements of dominoes, Sultan creates a visual metaphor for the limitations and possibilities of the still life tradition, and the liberties allowed within its set parameter.

The artist’s heavy use of industrial materials in the late twentieth century naturally led to his famous series of “catastrophic” paintings in the 1980s and 1990s. These industrial landscapes, titled the Disaster Paintings, illustrate the fragility of robust man-made structures, such as industrial plants and train cars, when faced with catastrophic events. This series was exhibited across the United States in a traveling exhibition in 2016 through 2018. The exhibition originated at the Lowe Art Museum at University of Miami and then traveled to the Museum of Modern Art, Fort Worth; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh; and Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln.

In recent years, Sultan has pursued his interest in disrupting the established gaze cast upon everyday objects. His recent depictions of tulips, poppies, mimosas and camellias continue to interrogate how these flowers have been manipulated in art history—and this interrogation is aimed to destabilize a wider culture of visual status quo.

Sultan studied at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and later received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He lives and works in New York, NY.

His first solo exhibition was mounted in 1977 at Artists Space in New York. He has since exhibited worldwide in landmark solo and group exhibitions. In 2016, a major solo exhibition of Sultan’s Disaster Paintings began a two-year tour of five American museums through 2018. Organized by Dr. Marla Price, the exhibition originated at the Lowe Art Museum at the University of Miami, FL travelling to the Museum of Modern Art, Fort Worth, TX; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, NC; and Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln, NE. In 2017, Sultan was featured in the British Museum's The American Dream: Pop to the Present; featuring fellow groundbreaking, American printmakers working from the 1960s onwards, the exhibition travelled to the Fondation Custodia in Paris, France in 2018 before moving onto CaixaForum Madrid, Barcelona, and Zaragoza in 2020 and 2021.

Sultan has also exhibited in solo and group shows at the Parrish Art Museum, NY (2024); Morris Museum, NJ (2024); Asheville Art Museum, NC (2023); Kemper Museum of Art, MO (2023); Cameron Art Museum, NC (2022); Huntington Museum of Art, WV (2021); Taubman Museum of Art, VA (2019); Sellars Gallery at Brenau University, GA (2018); British Museum, London (2017); Royal Academy of Arts, London (2017); Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, OH (2009); Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC (2000); Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, TN (2000); Gotlands KonstMuseum, Sweden (1996); Nationalgalerie, Berlin (1993); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY (1988); Museum of Modern Art, NY (1988); Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL (1987); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA (1987); Musée d’art Contemporain, Montreal (1984); and the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY (1979), among others.

His work is included in the collections of the Addison Gallery of American Art, MA; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, NY; Art Institute of Chicago, IL; Bank of America Collection; British Museum, London; Cleveland Art Museum, OH; Denver Art Museum, CO; Detroit Institute of Arts, MI; Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University, MA; High Museum of Art, GA; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Ludwig Museum, Budapest; Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, TX; Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, CA; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Museum of Modern Art, NY; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Nelson-Atkins Museum, MO; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, PA; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; Singapore Museum of Art, Singapore; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY; St. Louis Art Museum, MO; Tate Gallery, London; Toledo Museum of Art, OH; Walker Art Center, MN; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY.

For more than sixty years Alex Katz has remained dedicated to figurative art in his paintings, sculptures, and works on paper, despite the influence—and, at times, dominance—of abstraction since the postwar era. In 1957 Katz met Ada Del Moro; they married the following year, and she became one of the most frequent subjects of his paintings. Their relationship began during a period of artistic transition for Katz following several years of making small- scale collages. He has recalled how he came to abandon these works for what would become his signature painting style: “I said that if I enlarged them to six feet then I could be very successful, but it was much more interesting to try to paint a contemporary portrait.”

Prior to beginning the large-scale work The Red Smile, Katz made several preparatory drawings as well as smaller versions of the painting. This drafting process and its results recall the work of the Old Masters of Renaissance and Baroque art rather than the spontaneous, abstract compositions of many of Katz’s peers. As Katz himself has explained, he also shares with his fifteenth- and sixteenth-century artistic predecessors a desire to “search for beauty” in the visible world around him.

Evocative of a billboard advertisement or a film still, The Red Smile is a tightly cropped portrait of the head and shoulders of Ada, clad in a white shirt and blue headscarf. Her broadly smiling profile fills half of the horizontally oriented composition. With her distinctive fair skin and dark hair and eyebrows, she is as recognizable across Katz’s many paintings of her as are his signature expanses of flat, crisply delineated color.

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.”

Sultan’s early experiences building theatre sets at school, working in his father’s tire company in Asheville, and later in construction as a young artist in New York had a profound influence on his artistic development. These various lines of work led to an interest in industrial reproduction, heavy materials, and a practice of painting on floors and walls, à la Jackson Pollock. Sultan’s works, constructed horizontally, denote a purposely flat quality that borrows the synthetic flatness of stage sets while also utilizing the monumental weightiness of industrial materials—which harkens back to Asheville’s strong roots in manufacturing.

Interested in the artifice of nature as it is sold and packaged within a consumerist society, a major theme within Sultan’s work is studying the representation of an object or idea—how a flower, a factory, or a fruit is consumed in the Zeitgeist of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In the 1980s, Sultan began depicting lemons in the style of traditional still lifes. The blinding brightness of the yellow against the pitch black hue of the roofing tar he used as background make Sultan’s interpretations of these fruits hard to look at, while deferring monumental dignity to the common household good. The contrast of these natural organic shapes against the industrial materials and grid format has led Sultan to describe these works as pieces with “heavy structure, holding fragile meaning.” Playing with the dichotomy of meaning and material, perception and reality, the Lemon works began Sultan’s longstanding interest in depicting how an object is looked at, rather than the object itself.

His 1990s series on dominos and dice continue this reflection on the still life—the ultimate, slow, and concentrated gaze upon an object. A style entrenched in repetition and tradition, the repertoire of this style is ultimately limited, but the combinations endless. In his compositions of back dots and mathematically endless arrangements of dominoes, Sultan creates a visual metaphor for the limitations and possibilities of the still life tradition, and the liberties allowed within its set parameter.

The artist’s heavy use of industrial materials in the late twentieth century naturally led to his famous series of “catastrophic” paintings in the 1980s and 1990s. These industrial landscapes, titled the Disaster Paintings, illustrate the fragility of robust man-made structures, such as industrial plants and train cars, when faced with catastrophic events. This series was exhibited across the United States in a traveling exhibition in 2016 through 2018. The exhibition originated at the Lowe Art Museum at University of Miami and then traveled to the Museum of Modern Art, Fort Worth; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh; and Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln.

In recent years, Sultan has pursued his interest in disrupting the established gaze cast upon everyday objects. His recent depictions of tulips, poppies, mimosas and camellias continue to interrogate how these flowers have been manipulated in art history—and this interrogation is aimed to destabilize a wider culture of visual status quo.

Sultan studied at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and later received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He lives and works in New York, NY.

His first solo exhibition was mounted in 1977 at Artists Space in New York. He has since exhibited worldwide in landmark solo and group exhibitions. In 2016, a major solo exhibition of Sultan’s Disaster Paintings began a two-year tour of five American museums through 2018. Organized by Dr. Marla Price, the exhibition originated at the Lowe Art Museum at the University of Miami, FL travelling to the Museum of Modern Art, Fort Worth, TX; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, NC; and Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln, NE. In 2017, Sultan was featured in the British Museum's The American Dream: Pop to the Present; featuring fellow groundbreaking, American printmakers working from the 1960s onwards, the exhibition travelled to the Fondation Custodia in Paris, France in 2018 before moving onto CaixaForum Madrid, Barcelona, and Zaragoza in 2020 and 2021.

Sultan has also exhibited in solo and group shows at the Parrish Art Museum, NY (2024); Morris Museum, NJ (2024); Asheville Art Museum, NC (2023); Kemper Museum of Art, MO (2023); Cameron Art Museum, NC (2022); Huntington Museum of Art, WV (2021); Taubman Museum of Art, VA (2019); Sellars Gallery at Brenau University, GA (2018); British Museum, London (2017); Royal Academy of Arts, London (2017); Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, OH (2009); Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC (2000); Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, TN (2000); Gotlands KonstMuseum, Sweden (1996); Nationalgalerie, Berlin (1993); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY (1988); Museum of Modern Art, NY (1988); Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL (1987); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA (1987); Musée d’art Contemporain, Montreal (1984); and the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY (1979), among others.

His work is included in the collections of the Addison Gallery of American Art, MA; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, NY; Art Institute of Chicago, IL; Bank of America Collection; British Museum, London; Cleveland Art Museum, OH; Denver Art Museum, CO; Detroit Institute of Arts, MI; Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University, MA; High Museum of Art, GA; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Ludwig Museum, Budapest; Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, TX; Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, CA; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Museum of Modern Art, NY; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Nelson-Atkins Museum, MO; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, PA; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; Singapore Museum of Art, Singapore; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY; St. Louis Art Museum, MO; Tate Gallery, London; Toledo Museum of Art, OH; Walker Art Center, MN; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY.

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.”

Sultan’s early experiences building theatre sets at school, working in his father’s tire company in Asheville, and later in construction as a young artist in New York had a profound influence on his artistic development. These various lines of work led to an interest in industrial reproduction, heavy materials, and a practice of painting on floors and walls, à la Jackson Pollock. Sultan’s works, constructed horizontally, denote a purposely flat quality that borrows the synthetic flatness of stage sets while also utilizing the monumental weightiness of industrial materials—which harkens back to Asheville’s strong roots in manufacturing.

Interested in the artifice of nature as it is sold and packaged within a consumerist society, a major theme within Sultan’s work is studying the representation of an object or idea—how a flower, a factory, or a fruit is consumed in the Zeitgeist of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In the 1980s, Sultan began depicting lemons in the style of traditional still lifes. The blinding brightness of the yellow against the pitch black hue of the roofing tar he used as background make Sultan’s interpretations of these fruits hard to look at, while deferring monumental dignity to the common household good. The contrast of these natural organic shapes against the industrial materials and grid format has led Sultan to describe these works as pieces with “heavy structure, holding fragile meaning.” Playing with the dichotomy of meaning and material, perception and reality, the Lemon works began Sultan’s longstanding interest in depicting how an object is looked at, rather than the object itself.

His 1990s series on dominos and dice continue this reflection on the still life—the ultimate, slow, and concentrated gaze upon an object. A style entrenched in repetition and tradition, the repertoire of this style is ultimately limited, but the combinations endless. In his compositions of back dots and mathematically endless arrangements of dominoes, Sultan creates a visual metaphor for the limitations and possibilities of the still life tradition, and the liberties allowed within its set parameter.

The artist’s heavy use of industrial materials in the late twentieth century naturally led to his famous series of “catastrophic” paintings in the 1980s and 1990s. These industrial landscapes, titled the Disaster Paintings, illustrate the fragility of robust man-made structures, such as industrial plants and train cars, when faced with catastrophic events. This series was exhibited across the United States in a traveling exhibition in 2016 through 2018. The exhibition originated at the Lowe Art Museum at University of Miami and then traveled to the Museum of Modern Art, Fort Worth; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh; and Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln.

In recent years, Sultan has pursued his interest in disrupting the established gaze cast upon everyday objects. His recent depictions of tulips, poppies, mimosas and camellias continue to interrogate how these flowers have been manipulated in art history—and this interrogation is aimed to destabilize a wider culture of visual status quo.

Sultan studied at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and later received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He lives and works in New York, NY.

His first solo exhibition was mounted in 1977 at Artists Space in New York. He has since exhibited worldwide in landmark solo and group exhibitions. In 2016, a major solo exhibition of Sultan’s Disaster Paintings began a two-year tour of five American museums through 2018. Organized by Dr. Marla Price, the exhibition originated at the Lowe Art Museum at the University of Miami, FL travelling to the Museum of Modern Art, Fort Worth, TX; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, NC; and Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln, NE. In 2017, Sultan was featured in the British Museum's The American Dream: Pop to the Present; featuring fellow groundbreaking, American printmakers working from the 1960s onwards, the exhibition travelled to the Fondation Custodia in Paris, France in 2018 before moving onto CaixaForum Madrid, Barcelona, and Zaragoza in 2020 and 2021.

Sultan has also exhibited in solo and group shows at the Parrish Art Museum, NY (2024); Morris Museum, NJ (2024); Asheville Art Museum, NC (2023); Kemper Museum of Art, MO (2023); Cameron Art Museum, NC (2022); Huntington Museum of Art, WV (2021); Taubman Museum of Art, VA (2019); Sellars Gallery at Brenau University, GA (2018); British Museum, London (2017); Royal Academy of Arts, London (2017); Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, OH (2009); Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC (2000); Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, TN (2000); Gotlands KonstMuseum, Sweden (1996); Nationalgalerie, Berlin (1993); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY (1988); Museum of Modern Art, NY (1988); Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL (1987); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA (1987); Musée d’art Contemporain, Montreal (1984); and the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY (1979), among others.

His work is included in the collections of the Addison Gallery of American Art, MA; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, NY; Art Institute of Chicago, IL; Bank of America Collection; British Museum, London; Cleveland Art Museum, OH; Denver Art Museum, CO; Detroit Institute of Arts, MI; Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University, MA; High Museum of Art, GA; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Ludwig Museum, Budapest; Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, TX; Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, CA; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Museum of Modern Art, NY; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Nelson-Atkins Museum, MO; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, PA; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; Singapore Museum of Art, Singapore; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY; St. Louis Art Museum, MO; Tate Gallery, London; Toledo Museum of Art, OH; Walker Art Center, MN; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY.

Alex Katz in his downtown studio, New York City, 2024. Photo: Naeem Douglas

I always try to paint in the present tense. If you paint stories, you're painting in the past tense.

Alex Katz (b. 1927, Brooklyn, New York) is an American painter who is celebrated for his iconic portraits of contemporary society and his crisp, confident articulation of colour. Pristine flat surfaces, dramatic cropping, and economy of line are hallmarks of the artist’s work. When Katz first began painting in the early 1950s, his now-signature minimal aesthetic was perceived as a reaction to Abstract Expressionism; it would later register as an anticipation of Pop Art, albeit one that ultimately outlasted the movement.

An iconoclastic painter, Katz has many imitators but remains the undisputed master of cool, composed 20th-century portraiture of which more than 250 feature his wife Ada. He was awarded an honourary doctorate from Colby College in 1984 and currently serves on the Colby College Museum of Art’s board of governors. In addition to his painting practice, Katz is a prolific printmaker who continues to explore three-dimensional space with sculptural cutouts, a technique first established by the artist in 1959. The subject of over 200 solo exhibitions over his career, in 2022, Katz exhibited a retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Since 2022, the artist has focused on chronicling seasons and landscapes observed from his studios Maine and New York, with four monumental works from this series occupying the atrium of the Museum of Modern Art in New York over summer 2024 in Alex Katz: Seasons.

Employing a multi-media technique that includes oil, acrylic, print-making and gold leaf, Godlewska represents the landscapes and architecture she experiences during various overseas residencies. Both natural phenomena and man-made structures in a state of flux serve as consistent inspiration throughout her career, from clouds forming and dissipating to decaying architecture of bygone eras of the Baroque and Rococo. For this latest exhibition, her third solo show with the New Gallery, Godlewska’s canvases and watercolors on paper are filled with inspiration from the baroque churches of Sicily and the forests of Mauritius.

Alex Katz (American, b.1927) is one of the most recognized and widely-exhibited artists of his generation. Coming of age between Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art, Katz began exhibiting his work in 1954, and since that time he has produced a celebrated body of work that includes paintings, drawings, sculpture, and prints. His earliest work took inspiration from various aspects of mid-century American culture and society, including television, film, and advertising, and over the past five and a half decades he has established himself as a preeminent painter of modern life, whose distinctive portraits and lyrical landscapes bear a flattened surface and consistent economy of line. Utilizing characteristically wide brushstrokes, large swathes of color, and refined compositions, Katz created what art historian Robert Storr called “a new and distinctive type of realism in American art which combines aspects of both abstraction and representation.”

Since the 1950s, Alex Katz’s work has been the subject of more than 200 solo exhibitions and nearly 500 group exhibitions around the world. His work can be found in nearly 100 public collections worldwide, including the Art Institute of Chicago; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; the National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institute, Washington, DC; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; The Tate Gallery, London; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among many others.

Alex Katz, born 1927 in New York as the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, is one of the most important painters of our time, worldwide. Katz studied at the Cooper Union School of Art from 1946 to 1949. He then attended the renowned Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, which would later also produce such important artists as David Reed and Jason Rhoades, among others. From the 1950s onward, Katz developed a very independent painterly language which addresses the traditional genre of the landscape, as well as the portrait or figure painting. Although the general public sees Alex Katz as a pop artist, he does not consider himself to be one. Rather than emanating from a graphic implementation, such as that which pervades the works of Robert Indiana or Roy Lichtenstein for example, his images always emanate from painting.
Katz always begins his work by occupying himself with paint, from which he develops his very characteristic large-scale intercourse with space. The design of his pictorial reality is usually laid out extensively and appears with sharp, clear edges in his works from, at the latest, the end of the 1960s onward. He sees himself as a post-abstract painter who, in his realistic painting style, arranges the figure elements and sign elements in such a way that the observers combine them “in their heads” themselves. Katz is interested in the elementary question: What is reality? Taking this question as a starting point, he has spent the past 50 years repeatedly exploring possible ways with which “realism” can be redefined. Color and light play a central role in his works. Thus, even despite the ostensible realism, he pays less attention to the motif than to the look and style, i.e. the appearance. Alex Katz is represented in numerous international private collections and museum collections, and can look back on a wealth of international exhibition activity.

Alex Katz (b. 1927, Brooklyn, New York) is an American painter who is celebrated for his iconic portraits of contemporary society and his crisp, confident articulation of colour. Pristine flat surfaces, dramatic cropping, and economy of line are hallmarks of the artist’s work. When Katz first began painting in the early 1950s, his now-signature minimal aesthetic was perceived as a reaction to Abstract Expressionism; it would later register as an anticipation of Pop Art, albeit one that ultimately outlasted the movement.

An iconoclastic painter, Katz has many imitators but remains the undisputed master of cool, composed 20th-century portraiture of which more than 250 feature his wife Ada. He was awarded an honourary doctorate from Colby College in 1984 and currently serves on the Colby College Museum of Art’s board of governors. In addition to his painting practice, Katz is a prolific printmaker who continues to explore three-dimensional space with sculptural cutouts, a technique first established by the artist in 1959. The subject of over 200 solo exhibitions over his career, in 2022, Katz exhibited a retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Since 2022, the artist has focused on chronicling seasons and landscapes observed from his studios Maine and New York, with four monumental works from this series occupying the atrium of the Museum of Modern Art in New York over summer 2024 in Alex Katz: Seasons.

Alex Katz (b. 1927, Brooklyn, New York) is an American painter who is celebrated for his iconic portraits of contemporary society and his crisp, confident articulation of colour. Pristine flat surfaces, dramatic cropping, and economy of line are hallmarks of the artist’s work. When Katz first began painting in the early 1950s, his now-signature minimal aesthetic was perceived as a reaction to Abstract Expressionism; it would later register as an anticipation of Pop Art, albeit one that ultimately outlasted the movement.

An iconoclastic painter, Katz has many imitators but remains the undisputed master of cool, composed 20th-century portraiture of which more than 250 feature his wife Ada. He was awarded an honourary doctorate from Colby College in 1984 and currently serves on the Colby College Museum of Art’s board of governors. In addition to his painting practice, Katz is a prolific printmaker who continues to explore three-dimensional space with sculptural cutouts, a technique first established by the artist in 1959. The subject of over 200 solo exhibitions over his career, in 2022, Katz exhibited a retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Since 2022, the artist has focused on chronicling seasons and landscapes observed from his studios Maine and New York, with four monumental works from this series occupying the atrium of the Museum of Modern Art in New York over summer 2024 in Alex Katz: Seasons.

Alex Katz (American, b.1927) is one of the most recognized and widely-exhibited artists of his generation. Coming of age between Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art, Katz began exhibiting his work in 1954, and since that time he has produced a celebrated body of work that includes paintings, drawings, sculpture, and prints. His earliest work took inspiration from various aspects of mid-century American culture and society, including television, film, and advertising, and over the past five and a half decades he has established himself as a preeminent painter of modern life, whose distinctive portraits and lyrical landscapes bear a flattened surface and consistent economy of line. Utilizing characteristically wide brushstrokes, large swathes of color, and refined compositions, Katz created what art historian Robert Storr called “a new and distinctive type of realism in American art which combines aspects of both abstraction and representation.”

Since the 1950s, Alex Katz’s work has been the subject of more than 200 solo exhibitions and nearly 500 group exhibitions around the world. His work can be found in nearly 100 public collections worldwide, including the Art Institute of Chicago; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; the National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institute, Washington, DC; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; The Tate Gallery, London; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among many others.

Alex Katz, born 1927 in New York as the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, is one of the most important painters of our time, worldwide. Katz studied at the Cooper Union School of Art from 1946 to 1949. He then attended the renowned Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, which would later also produce such important artists as David Reed and Jason Rhoades, among others. From the 1950s onward, Katz developed a very independent painterly language which addresses the traditional genre of the landscape, as well as the portrait or figure painting. Although the general public sees Alex Katz as a pop artist, he does not consider himself to be one. Rather than emanating from a graphic implementation, such as that which pervades the works of Robert Indiana or Roy Lichtenstein for example, his images always emanate from painting.

Katz always begins his work by occupying himself with paint, from which he develops his very characteristic large-scale intercourse with space. The design of his pictorial reality is usually laid out extensively and appears with sharp, clear edges in his works from, at the latest, the end of the 1960s onward. He sees himself as a post-abstract painter who, in his realistic painting style, arranges the figure elements and sign elements in such a way that the observers combine them “in their heads” themselves. Katz is interested in the elementary question: What is reality? Taking this question as a starting point, he has spent the past 50 years repeatedly exploring possible ways with which “realism” can be redefined. Color and light play a central role in his works. Thus, even despite the ostensible realism, he pays less attention to the motif than to the look and style, i.e. the appearance. Alex Katz is represented in numerous international private collections and museum collections, and can look back on a wealth of international exhibition activity.

Alex Katz (b. 1927, Brooklyn, New York) is an American painter who is celebrated for his iconic portraits of contemporary society and his crisp, confident articulation of colour. Pristine flat surfaces, dramatic cropping, and economy of line are hallmarks of the artist’s work. When Katz first began painting in the early 1950s, his now-signature minimal aesthetic was perceived as a reaction to Abstract Expressionism; it would later register as an anticipation of Pop Art, albeit one that ultimately outlasted the movement.

An iconoclastic painter, Katz has many imitators but remains the undisputed master of cool, composed 20th-century portraiture of which more than 250 feature his wife Ada. He was awarded an honourary doctorate from Colby College in 1984 and currently serves on the Colby College Museum of Art’s board of governors. In addition to his painting practice, Katz is a prolific printmaker who continues to explore three-dimensional space with sculptural cutouts, a technique first established by the artist in 1959. The subject of over 200 solo exhibitions over his career, in 2022, Katz exhibited a retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Since 2022, the artist has focused on chronicling seasons and landscapes observed from his studios Maine and New York, with four monumental works from this series occupying the atrium of the Museum of Modern Art in New York over summer 2024 in Alex Katz: Seasons.

Alex Katz (American, b.1927) is one of the most recognized and widely-exhibited artists of his generation. Coming of age between Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art, Katz began exhibiting his work in 1954, and since that time he has produced a celebrated body of work that includes paintings, drawings, sculpture, and prints. His earliest work took inspiration from various aspects of mid-century American culture and society, including television, film, and advertising, and over the past five and a half decades he has established himself as a preeminent painter of modern life, whose distinctive portraits and lyrical landscapes bear a flattened surface and consistent economy of line. Utilizing characteristically wide brushstrokes, large swathes of color, and refined compositions, Katz created what art historian Robert Storr called “a new and distinctive type of realism in American art which combines aspects of both abstraction and representation.”

Since the 1950s, Alex Katz’s work has been the subject of more than 200 solo exhibitions and nearly 500 group exhibitions around the world. His work can be found in nearly 100 public collections worldwide, including the Art Institute of Chicago; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; the National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institute, Washington, DC; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; The Tate Gallery, London; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among many others.

Alex Katz (American, b.1927) is one of the most recognized and widely-exhibited artists of his generation. Coming of age between Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art, Katz began exhibiting his work in 1954, and since that time he has produced a celebrated body of work that includes paintings, drawings, sculpture, and prints. His earliest work took inspiration from various aspects of mid-century American culture and society, including television, film, and advertising, and over the past five and a half decades he has established himself as a preeminent painter of modern life, whose distinctive portraits and lyrical landscapes bear a flattened surface and consistent economy of line. Utilizing characteristically wide brushstrokes, large swathes of color, and refined compositions, Katz created what art historian Robert Storr called “a new and distinctive type of realism in American art which combines aspects of both abstraction and representation.”

Since the 1950s, Alex Katz’s work has been the subject of more than 200 solo exhibitions and nearly 500 group exhibitions around the world. His work can be found in nearly 100 public collections worldwide, including the Art Institute of Chicago; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; the National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institute, Washington, DC; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; The Tate Gallery, London; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among many others.

For more than sixty years Alex Katz has remained dedicated to figurative art in his paintings, sculptures, and works on paper, despite the influence—and, at times, dominance—of abstraction since the postwar era. In 1957 Katz met Ada Del Moro; they married the following year, and she became one of the most frequent subjects of his paintings. Their relationship began during a period of artistic transition for Katz following several years of making small- scale collages. He has recalled how he came to abandon these works for what would become his signature painting style: “I said that if I enlarged them to six feet then I could be very successful, but it was much more interesting to try to paint a contemporary portrait.”

Prior to beginning the large-scale work The Red Smile, Katz made several preparatory drawings as well as smaller versions of the painting. This drafting process and its results recall the work of the Old Masters of Renaissance and Baroque art rather than the spontaneous, abstract compositions of many of Katz’s peers. As Katz himself has explained, he also shares with his fifteenth- and sixteenth-century artistic predecessors a desire to “search for beauty” in the visible world around him.

Evocative of a billboard advertisement or a film still, The Red Smile is a tightly cropped portrait of the head and shoulders of Ada, clad in a white shirt and blue headscarf. Her broadly smiling profile fills half of the horizontally oriented composition. With her distinctive fair skin and dark hair and eyebrows, she is as recognizable across Katz’s many paintings of her as are his signature expanses of flat, crisply delineated color.

Alex Katz (b. 1927, Brooklyn, New York) is an American painter who is celebrated for his iconic portraits of contemporary society and his crisp, confident articulation of colour. Pristine flat surfaces, dramatic cropping, and economy of line are hallmarks of the artist’s work. When Katz first began painting in the early 1950s, his now-signature minimal aesthetic was perceived as a reaction to Abstract Expressionism; it would later register as an anticipation of Pop Art, albeit one that ultimately outlasted the movement.

An iconoclastic painter, Katz has many imitators but remains the undisputed master of cool, composed 20th-century portraiture of which more than 250 feature his wife Ada. He was awarded an honourary doctorate from Colby College in 1984 and currently serves on the Colby College Museum of Art’s board of governors. In addition to his painting practice, Katz is a prolific printmaker who continues to explore three-dimensional space with sculptural cutouts, a technique first established by the artist in 1959. The subject of over 200 solo exhibitions over his career, in 2022, Katz exhibited a retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Since 2022, the artist has focused on chronicling seasons and landscapes observed from his studios Maine and New York, with four monumental works from this series occupying the atrium of the Museum of Modern Art in New York over summer 2024 in Alex Katz: Seasons.

Donald Sultan (born 1951), is one of the leading American contemporary still life artists. He currently lives and works in New York.

Born in 1951 in Asheville, North Carolina, Donald Sultan received his BFA from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and his MFA from the School of the Art Institute in Chicago. He moved to New York in 1975. The work of Donald Sultan is voluminous and varied. Since his first one-man show in 1977, he has enjoyed a distinguished career as painter, printmaker, and sculptor. His extensive body of work has placed him at the forefront of contemporary art, where he has become best known for his ability to successfully merge the best of yesterday's artistic tradition with a fresh, modern approach that is unique.

Although his paintings fit into the criteria of a still life, Sultan describes these works as first and foremost abstract. The largeness of Sultan's compositions, huge pieces of fruit, flowers, dominoes and other objects, set against the stark, unsettling tar-black, eight-foot square background, dominate the viewer. He is best known for his lemons, flowers and fruit, and states that his subjects develop from previous work. For example: the oval of his lemons has led to a series of oval-blossomed tulips, dots from dice have become oranges. What does not change with Sultan's work is the powerful statement his forms make. Sultan's work incorporates basic geometric and organic forms with a formal purity that is both subtle and monumental. His images are weighty, with equal emphasis on both negative and positive areas. Sultan describes his work as "heavy structure, holding fragile meaning" with the ability to "turn you off and turn you on at the same time." Sultan's still lifes have been described as studies in contrast. His powerfully sensual, fleshy object representations are rendered through a labor-intensive and unique method.

Sultan has been given numerous exhibitions dedicated to his work, as well as having been included in a number of group shows. Sultan has received two honorary doctorate degrees from The Corcoran School of Art in Washington D.C. and the New York Academy of Art. His work is included in the permanent collection of many prestigious institutions including: The Museum of Modern Art in New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, Tate Gallery in London, Hirshorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Sultan, an internationally recognized artist who rose to prominence in the late 1970s as part of the “New Image” movement, is known for elevating the still-life tradition through the deconstruction of his subjects into basic forms and the use of industrial materials. His paintings characteristically employ enamel, roofing tar, aluminum, linoleum, and spackle, pushing the boundaries of the medium through techniques of gouging, sanding, and buffing to create flatness, depth, and texture. The works are made of the same materials as the building in which the viewer stands; the architecture participates in the paintings. Weighty and structured, Sultan’s paintings are simultaneously abstract and representational: while his imagery is immediately recognizable – flowers, daily objects, insignia, idle factories – the dominating, abstract forms contradict its common association with fragility.

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, Chicago. His first solo exhibition was mounted in 1977 at Artists Space in New York, and his work has since been exhibited worldwide in solo and group exhibitions, including at: the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Gotlands Konst Museum, Sweden; Institute of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Memphis Brooks Museum, Memphis; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Musée d’art Contemporain, Montreal; National Galerie, Berlin; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. His work is included in internationally renowned public and private collections, among them The Art Institute of Chicago; British Museum; Cincinnati Art Museum; Cleveland Art Museum; Dallas Museum of Fine Arts; Detroit Institute of Arts; Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University, Cambridge; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Ludwig Museum, Budapest; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Neuberger Museum at SUNY-Purchase, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Singapore Museum of Art; The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Tate Gallery, London; and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.

Sultan, an internationally recognized artist who rose to prominence in the late 1970s as part of the “New Image” movement, is known for elevating the still-life tradition through the deconstruction of his subjects into basic forms and the use of industrial materials. His paintings characteristically employ enamel, roofing tar, aluminum, linoleum, and spackle, pushing the boundaries of the medium through techniques of gouging, sanding, and buffing to create flatness, depth, and texture. The works are made of the same materials as the building in which the viewer stands; the architecture participates in the paintings. Weighty and structured, Sultan’s paintings are simultaneously abstract and representational: while his imagery is immediately recognizable – flowers, daily objects, insignia, idle factories – the dominating, abstract forms contradict its common association with fragility.

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, Chicago. His first solo exhibition was mounted in 1977 at Artists Space in New York, and his work has since been exhibited worldwide in solo and group exhibitions, including at: the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Gotlands Konst Museum, Sweden; Institute of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Memphis Brooks Museum, Memphis; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Musée d’art Contemporain, Montreal; National Galerie, Berlin; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. His work is included in internationally renowned public and private collections, among them The Art Institute of Chicago; British Museum; Cincinnati Art Museum; Cleveland Art Museum; Dallas Museum of Fine Arts; Detroit Institute of Arts; Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University, Cambridge; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Ludwig Museum, Budapest; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Neuberger Museum at SUNY-Purchase, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Singapore Museum of Art; The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Tate Gallery, London; and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.

Sultan, an internationally recognized artist who rose to prominence in the late 1970s as part of the “New Image” movement, is known for elevating the still-life tradition through the deconstruction of his subjects into basic forms and the use of industrial materials. His paintings characteristically employ enamel, roofing tar, aluminum, linoleum, and spackle, pushing the boundaries of the medium through techniques of gouging, sanding, and buffing to create flatness, depth, and texture. The works are made of the same materials as the building in which the viewer stands; the architecture participates in the paintings. Weighty and structured, Sultan’s paintings are simultaneously abstract and representational: while his imagery is immediately recognizable – flowers, daily objects, insignia, idle factories – the dominating, abstract forms contradict its common association with fragility.

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, Chicago. His first solo exhibition was mounted in 1977 at Artists Space in New York, and his work has since been exhibited worldwide in solo and group exhibitions, including at: the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Gotlands Konst Museum, Sweden; Institute of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Memphis Brooks Museum, Memphis; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Musée d’art Contemporain, Montreal; National Galerie, Berlin; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. His work is included in internationally renowned public and private collections, among them The Art Institute of Chicago; British Museum; Cincinnati Art Museum; Cleveland Art Museum; Dallas Museum of Fine Arts; Detroit Institute of Arts; Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University, Cambridge; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Ludwig Museum, Budapest; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Neuberger Museum at SUNY-Purchase, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Singapore Museum of Art; The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Tate Gallery, London; and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.

Sultan, an internationally recognized artist who rose to prominence in the late 1970s as part of the “New Image” movement, is known for elevating the still-life tradition through the deconstruction of his subjects into basic forms and the use of industrial materials. His paintings characteristically employ enamel, roofing tar, aluminum, linoleum, and spackle, pushing the boundaries of the medium through techniques of gouging, sanding, and buffing to create flatness, depth, and texture. The works are made of the same materials as the building in which the viewer stands; the architecture participates in the paintings. Weighty and structured, Sultan’s paintings are simultaneously abstract and representational: while his imagery is immediately recognizable – flowers, daily objects, insignia, idle factories – the dominating, abstract forms contradict its common association with fragility.

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, Chicago. His first solo exhibition was mounted in 1977 at Artists Space in New York, and his work has since been exhibited worldwide in solo and group exhibitions, including at: the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Gotlands Konst Museum, Sweden; Institute of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Memphis Brooks Museum, Memphis; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Musée d’art Contemporain, Montreal; National Galerie, Berlin; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. His work is included in internationally renowned public and private collections, among them The Art Institute of Chicago; British Museum; Cincinnati Art Museum; Cleveland Art Museum; Dallas Museum of Fine Arts; Detroit Institute of Arts; Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University, Cambridge; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Ludwig Museum, Budapest; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Neuberger Museum at SUNY-Purchase, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Singapore Museum of Art; The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Tate Gallery, London; and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.

Sultan, an internationally recognized artist who rose to prominence in the late 1970s as part of the “New Image” movement, is known for elevating the still-life tradition through the deconstruction of his subjects into basic forms and the use of industrial materials. His paintings characteristically employ enamel, roofing tar, aluminum, linoleum, and spackle, pushing the boundaries of the medium through techniques of gouging, sanding, and buffing to create flatness, depth, and texture. The works are made of the same materials as the building in which the viewer stands; the architecture participates in the paintings. Weighty and structured, Sultan’s paintings are simultaneously abstract and representational: while his imagery is immediately recognizable – flowers, daily objects, insignia, idle factories – the dominating, abstract forms contradict its common association with fragility.

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, Chicago. His first solo exhibition was mounted in 1977 at Artists Space in New York, and his work has since been exhibited worldwide in solo and group exhibitions, including at: the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Gotlands Konst Museum, Sweden; Institute of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Memphis Brooks Museum, Memphis; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Musée d’art Contemporain, Montreal; National Galerie, Berlin; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. His work is included in internationally renowned public and private collections, among them The Art Institute of Chicago; British Museum; Cincinnati Art Museum; Cleveland Art Museum; Dallas Museum of Fine Arts; Detroit Institute of Arts; Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University, Cambridge; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Ludwig Museum, Budapest; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Neuberger Museum at SUNY-Purchase, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Singapore Museum of Art; The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Tate Gallery, London; and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.

Sultan, an internationally recognized artist who rose to prominence in the late 1970s as part of the “New Image” movement, is known for elevating the still-life tradition through the deconstruction of his subjects into basic forms and the use of industrial materials. His paintings characteristically employ enamel, roofing tar, aluminum, linoleum, and spackle, pushing the boundaries of the medium through techniques of gouging, sanding, and buffing to create flatness, depth, and texture. The works are made of the same materials as the building in which the viewer stands; the architecture participates in the paintings. Weighty and structured, Sultan’s paintings are simultaneously abstract and representational: while his imagery is immediately recognizable – flowers, daily objects, insignia, idle factories – the dominating, abstract forms contradict its common association with fragility.

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, Chicago. His first solo exhibition was mounted in 1977 at Artists Space in New York, and his work has since been exhibited worldwide in solo and group exhibitions, including at: the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Gotlands Konst Museum, Sweden; Institute of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Memphis Brooks Museum, Memphis; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Musée d’art Contemporain, Montreal; National Galerie, Berlin; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. His work is included in internationally renowned public and private collections, among them The Art Institute of Chicago; British Museum; Cincinnati Art Museum; Cleveland Art Museum; Dallas Museum of Fine Arts; Detroit Institute of Arts; Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University, Cambridge; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Ludwig Museum, Budapest; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Neuberger Museum at SUNY-Purchase, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Singapore Museum of Art; The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Tate Gallery, London; and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.

Sultan, an internationally recognized artist who rose to prominence in the late 1970s as part of the “New Image” movement, is known for elevating the still-life tradition through the deconstruction of his subjects into basic forms and the use of industrial materials. His paintings characteristically employ enamel, roofing tar, aluminum, linoleum, and spackle, pushing the boundaries of the medium through techniques of gouging, sanding, and buffing to create flatness, depth, and texture. The works are made of the same materials as the building in which the viewer stands; the architecture participates in the paintings. Weighty and structured, Sultan’s paintings are simultaneously abstract and representational: while his imagery is immediately recognizable – flowers, daily objects, insignia, idle factories – the dominating, abstract forms contradict its common association with fragility.

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, Chicago. His first solo exhibition was mounted in 1977 at Artists Space in New York, and his work has since been exhibited worldwide in solo and group exhibitions, including at: the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Gotlands Konst Museum, Sweden; Institute of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Memphis Brooks Museum, Memphis; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Musée d’art Contemporain, Montreal; National Galerie, Berlin; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. His work is included in internationally renowned public and private collections, among them The Art Institute of Chicago; British Museum; Cincinnati Art Museum; Cleveland Art Museum; Dallas Museum of Fine Arts; Detroit Institute of Arts; Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University, Cambridge; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Ludwig Museum, Budapest; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Neuberger Museum at SUNY-Purchase, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Singapore Museum of Art; The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Tate Gallery, London; and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.

Born in 1951 in Asheville, North Carolina, Donald Sultan received his BFA from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and his MFA from the School of the Art Institute in Chicago. He moved to New York in 1975. His work is voluminous and varied and has placed him at the forefront of contemporary art. Although his paintings fit into the criteria of a still life, Sultan describes these works as first and foremost abstract. The largeness of Sultan’s compositions follow the formula of a huge pieces of fruit, flowers, dominoes, and other objects, set against a stark, single-colored, square background. He is best known for his lemons and fruit, and states that his subjects develop from previous work. The oval of his lemons has led to a series of ovalblossomed tulips. Dots from dice have become oranges. What does not change with Sultan’s work is the powerful statement his forms make. Sultan’s work incorporates basic geometric and organic forms with a formal purity that is both subtle and monumental. His images are weighty, with equal emphasis on both negative and positive areas. His powerfully sensual, fleshy object representations are rendered through a labor-intensive and unique method.

Born in 1951 in Asheville, North Carolina, Donald Sultan received his BFA from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and his MFA from the School of the Art Institute in Chicago. He moved to New York in 1975. His work is voluminous and varied and has placed him at the forefront of contemporary art. Although his paintings fit into the criteria of a still life, Sultan describes these works as first and foremost abstract. The largeness of Sultan’s compositions follow the formula of a huge pieces of fruit, flowers, dominoes, and other objects, set against a stark, single-colored, square background. He is best known for his lemons and fruit, and states that his subjects develop from previous work. The oval of his lemons has led to a series of ovalblossomed tulips. Dots from dice have become oranges. What does not change with Sultan’s work is the powerful statement his forms make. Sultan’s work incorporates basic geometric and organic forms with a formal purity that is both subtle and monumental. His images are weighty, with equal emphasis on both negative and positive areas. His powerfully sensual, fleshy object representations are rendered through a labor-intensive and unique method.

Sultan, an internationally recognized artist who rose to prominence in the late 1970s as part of the “New Image” movement, is known for elevating the still-life tradition through the deconstruction of his subjects into basic forms and the use of industrial materials. His paintings characteristically employ enamel, roofing tar, aluminum, linoleum, and spackle, pushing the boundaries of the medium through techniques of gouging, sanding, and buffing to create flatness, depth, and texture. The works are made of the same materials as the building in which the viewer stands; the architecture participates in the paintings. Weighty and structured, Sultan’s paintings are simultaneously abstract and representational: while his imagery is immediately recognizable – flowers, daily objects, insignia, idle factories – the dominating, abstract forms contradict its common association with fragility.

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, Chicago. His first solo exhibition was mounted in 1977 at Artists Space in New York, and his work has since been exhibited worldwide in solo and group exhibitions, including at: the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Gotlands Konst Museum, Sweden; Institute of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Memphis Brooks Museum, Memphis; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Musée d’art Contemporain, Montreal; National Galerie, Berlin; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. His work is included in internationally renowned public and private collections, among them The Art Institute of Chicago; British Museum; Cincinnati Art Museum; Cleveland Art Museum; Dallas Museum of Fine Arts; Detroit Institute of Arts; Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University, Cambridge; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Ludwig Museum, Budapest; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Neuberger Museum at SUNY-Purchase, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Singapore Museum of Art; The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Tate Gallery, London; and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.

Sultan, an internationally recognized artist who rose to prominence in the late 1970s as part of the “New Image” movement, is known for elevating the still-life tradition through the deconstruction of his subjects into basic forms and the use of industrial materials. His paintings characteristically employ enamel, roofing tar, aluminum, linoleum, and spackle, pushing the boundaries of the medium through techniques of gouging, sanding, and buffing to create flatness, depth, and texture. The works are made of the same materials as the building in which the viewer stands; the architecture participates in the paintings. Weighty and structured, Sultan’s paintings are simultaneously abstract and representational: while his imagery is immediately recognizable – flowers, daily objects, insignia, idle factories – the dominating, abstract forms contradict its common association with fragility.

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, Chicago. His first solo exhibition was mounted in 1977 at Artists Space in New York, and his work has since been exhibited worldwide in solo and group exhibitions, including at: the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Gotlands Konst Museum, Sweden; Institute of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Memphis Brooks Museum, Memphis; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Musée d’art Contemporain, Montreal; National Galerie, Berlin; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. His work is included in internationally renowned public and private collections, among them The Art Institute of Chicago; British Museum; Cincinnati Art Museum; Cleveland Art Museum; Dallas Museum of Fine Arts; Detroit Institute of Arts; Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University, Cambridge; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Ludwig Museum, Budapest; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Neuberger Museum at SUNY-Purchase, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Singapore Museum of Art; The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Tate Gallery, London; and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.