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.

For over forty years, Sultan has redefined the still-life through a language of reduction
and material weight. In these new drawings, he returns to the motif of the flower,
constructing mirages of camellia and mimosa flowers with conté, graphite and
charcoal on paper. Through this interplay of gesture and absence, Sultan transforms
the image of the flower into an emblem of time, memory, and dissolution.

The circle has been a recurrent structure in Sultan’s work since the 1980s, both as symbol and as compositional framework. In the forthcoming 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.