Solo show: DONALD SULTAN (over)

	Donald Sultan 12 Colors I Siebdruck, 63,5 x 51 cm 2007

Hilger modern Hilger modern Dorotheergasse 5 1010 Vienna Austria (city map) Send E-mail tel +43 (0)1 - 512 53 15 www.hilger.at

The Galerie Ernst Hilger is showing a representative sample of Donald Sultan's work since the 1990s, with the focus on his current production. Donald Sultan remarked that he wanted to include something black into all the opulence, something that might be a hole and at the same time had volume. A weight that bore down on the opulence of the other fruits and introduced a mysterious quality. To make something industrial, weighty, out of still life. Donald Sultan's work manifests itself as deeply ambiguous by making the polarities of figuration and abstraction merge into each other in charged intensity. We experience on the one hand the stylised, demonstrative use of motif as in a poster, comparable with Warhol's Flowers, on the other the expressive material the American artist experienced through abstract expressionism (Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline), and post-minimalism oriented on gesture and using industrial materials (Richard Serra, Robert Morris). Added to this is the penchant towards a personal touch and the individual aesthetic scheme, despite serial character. We cannot deny there is a certain sensuousness in the appealingly opulent works. The organic form of the flower evokes associations of female eroticism.

Donald Sultan was born in Asheville, North Carolina in 1951 and lives and works in New York. His pictures are represented in the collections of leading museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., the Tate Gallery, London, and so forth.