[dropcap style=”font-size:100px;color:#992211;”]A[/dropcap]cclaimed American figurative painter Donald Sultan is to receive his first UK retrospective at Huxley-Parlour Gallery, London.
Arranged over two floors, Dark Objects: Works 1977-2019 is comprised of 17 works and features three canvasses from his seminal Disaster Paintings series. Sultan has not shown in London in 10 years, so this exhibition is timely, providing an opportunity to re-evaluate his work and position him within the canon of post-war contemporary art.
Sultan is best known for his large-scale paintings produced using a range of industrial and non-art materials, including tar, latex and rubber, and for his graphic and restrained investigations of form. The exhibition seeks to reassert Sultan’s status as a pivotal figure in the reinvention of painting that occurred in New York in the 1980s, and also in the reestablishment of figuration in contemporary painting.
The exhibition will include early smaller-scale experiments in tar, tile and Masonite from the 1970s, as well as works in charcoal from the artist’s Black Lemons series. These were exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1988 and preceded an in-depth investigation into the reduction of form. New works to be presented in the downstairs gallery are taken from subsequent series that reinvent the genre of still life, deconstructing fruits and flowers into their basic forms.
Says Giles Huxley-Parlour, gallery director: “The New York art scene of the 1980s gave rise to many great talents, and the paintings in this exhibition reveal Donald Sultan to be one of the key figures of that period. The featured works reveal a painter of vital, unerring energy and unique talent. It is an honour to be able to bring his work together for this timely retrospective.”
Dark Objects: Works 1977-2019 runs from 5 – 29 June. For further information, visit Huxley Parlour’s website here.
Naila Scargill is the publisher and editor of horror journal Exquisite Terror. Holding a broad editorial background, she has worked with an eclectic variety of content, ranging from film and the counterculture, to political news and finance.
