Donald Sultan Wallflower (Aqua and Dark Green) 2018 Signed Screenprint Edition of 12

Artist: Donald Sultan
Title: Wallflower (Aqua and Dark Green)
Medium: Screenprint in Colors
Size: 69" h × 27" w
Edition: 9/12
Publisher: Har-El Printers and Publishers, Tel Aviv
Inscription: Initialed, numbered, and dated '9/12 Aqua and Dark Green Jun 10 2018 DS'
Year: 2018
Documentation: Gallery Certificate of Authenticity

"Wallflower (Aqua and Dark Green)" is a large-format color screenprint by Donald Sultan, an American artist whose work has significantly shaped contemporary approaches to still life and print media. Sultan's practice is characterized by its formal clarity, the reduction of organic forms to bold silhouettes, and an emphasis on material presence and surface tension. Floral imagery, a recurring motif throughout his career, anchors Wallflower within a lineage of works that explore the interplay of representation and abstraction.

Sultan's floral works and prints are held in the permanent collections of major museums internationally, underscoring their critical and historical significance. Examples of related floral prints appear in the collection of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., including works such as Flowers and Yellow Roses, which illustrate Sultan's longstanding engagement with botanical forms in print media. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York also houses flower-related works by Sultan, including woodcuts such as Blue Flowers, Black Flowers, and Six Red Flowers from 1999, which further demonstrate the artist's exploration of organic subject matter through printmaking processes. (Green Flowers is part of the collection at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University.) These institutional placements indicate a sustained curatorial interest in Sultan's floral imagery and print practice within the broader context of contemporary art.

"Wallflower (Aqua and Dark Green)" was published by Har-El Printers and Publishers in Tel Aviv in 2018 and is numbered 9 of a limited edition of 12 impressions. The work is initialed, numbered, and dated in pencil in the margin "9/12 Aqua and Dark Green Jun 10 2018 DS", signifying Sultan's personal authentication. The print measures 69 inches in height by 27 inches in width and is accompanied by a Gallery Certificate of Authenticity, confirming its provenance and edition details. As a large-scale screenprint, Wallflower exemplifies Sultan's ability to fuse graphic impact with simplified natural imagery, situating the work within his broader investigation of form, pattern, and the expressive capacities of print.

About Donald Sultan

Donald Sultan (b. 1951, Asheville, North Carolina) is an American artist known for redefining still life through the use of industrial materials and a rigorous, graphic visual language. Emerging in the late 1970s and early 1980s, he was part of a generation that reintroduced recognizable imagery at a time when abstraction and conceptual strategies dominated contemporary art.

Sultan earned a BFA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (1973) and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1975). He first gained recognition for large-scale works incorporating unconventional materials such as tar, vinyl tiles, enamel, and spackle applied to industrial supports. Depicting subjects like flowers, fruit, tools, and architectural forms, these works bridge abstraction and representation while emphasizing surface, structure, and process.

During the 1980s, Sultan became closely associated with a renewed interest in still life. His iconic lemons, poppies, tulips, and mimosas translate traditional motifs into bold, simplified compositions marked by strong contrast, dark grounds, and pronounced negative space. Rather than illusionistic depth, his work stresses material presence and compositional clarity, aligning with dialogues around Minimalism and post-Minimalism.

Printmaking is central to Sultan's practice. Collaborating with major workshops such as Universal Limited Art Editions, he developed technically complex prints that combine processes including intaglio, screenprint, lithography, and woodcut. These works explore scale, repetition, and variation while retaining the physical impact of his paintings.

Sultan's work is held in major museum collections including MoMA, the Guggenheim, the Whitney, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, LACMA, and Tate. His career reflects a sustained commitment to merging formal discipline with material experimentation, producing a body of work that remains influential in late twentieth- and twenty-first-century American art.