Donald Sultan:Drawings

Huxley-Parlour gallery are pleased to announce an exhibition of recent works on paper by American artist Donald Sultan (b. 1951). In these works, Sultan turns again to the still-life, one of painting’s oldest forms, and renders it newly unfamiliar. Flowers, depicted geometrically and stripped of their softness, emerge from the dense materiality of charcoal.

The circle has been a recurrent structure in Sultan’s work since the 1980s, both as symbol and as compositional framework. In the works in this exhibition this motif evolves into a form of both description and interruption. Perfect, rhythmic circles that punctuate the picture plain both describe the globular mimosa flowers and serve as a destabilizing act of erasure that opens the composition towards abstraction. The resulting works exist in a state of suspended contradiction: at once solid and illusory, constructed and ephemeral.

Over the course of his career, Sultan has become known for his graphic and restrained investigations of form. He has worked with tar, latex and rubber to explore the expressive potential of weight and texture. These recent works on paper extend that investigation into a more intimate register, where fragility and control coexist.