2010 Lifetime Achievement Award to artist Donald Sultan

Meet  honoree Donald Sultan at his book signing on Saturday July 10, from 2-3pm in the Collectors Lounge

Over the past three decades, Mr. Sultan has combined simplified imagery and complex techniques to reinvent the still life. Working with uncharacteristic materials (tar, spackle, and linoleum tile), Sultan pushes the boundaries of painting; he gouges, excavates, and spackles his imagery into works that are both sumptuous and spare.  His subjects, whether natural, artificial, or industrial, are imbued with a paradoxical sense of solidity and vulnerability.  Critic Carter Radcliff writes, “At once abstract and figurative, his images are endlessly elusive...Hovering between our familiar categories, these works escape them all.”  Sultan’s work, simultaneously elegant and brutal, reveals the essence of his subjects and of his materials.

Sultan’s art has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA, and the Museum of Modern Art, NY. Sultan was born in 1951 in Asheville, North Carolina.  After receiving his B FA from University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, he attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where he earned his MFA.  Since then Sultan has exhibited all over the world and 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 a monograph on Sultan was published by the Vendome Press, New York, which includes essays by Carter Radcliff and John B. Ravenal.

At the 2010 ArtHamptons Fair, the Mary Ryan Gallery will present a one-person exhibition of work by Donald Sultan including large-scale paintings, drawings, and original prints. Sultan has been a Sag Harbor resident since 1985. This will mark the first time in nearly 15 years that there has been a solo presentation of Sultan’s work in the Hamptons. Mary Ryan Gallery has had six solo exhibitions with Sultan and has been publishing prints with the artist since 1996.

Past winners of the ArtHamptons Lifetime Achievement Award include artists  Will Barnet and Jane Wilson, and photographers Lillian Bassman and Elliott Erwitt.

Past winners were:

2009	2009	2009	2008
Jane Wilson	Elliott Erwitt	Lillian Bassman	Will Barnett