FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Fort Worth, TX

 

Kendal Smith Lake
Manager of Communications
817.840.2167
kendal@themodern.org
www.themodern.org
 
Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth Presents
Donald Sultan: The Disaster Paintings
February 19-April 23, 2017
The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth presents the first exhibition focusing on Donald Sultan's seminal Disaster Paintings series, including eleven signature paintings from 1984 to 1990. Donald Sultan: The Disaster Paintings is organized by the Modern's assistant curator, Alison Hearst. The exhibition will be on view at the Lowe Art Museum, Miami, September 29-December 23, 2016; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, February 19-April 23, 2017; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC, May 26-September 4, 2017; North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, September 23-December 31, 2017; and Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln, January 24-May 13, 2018.
 
Artist Donald Sultan's career began with his first solo exhibition in 1977 in New York City, when he was just 26 years old, and he rose to prominence in the 1980s. A painter, sculptor, and printmaker, Sultan is regarded for his ongoing large-scale painted still lifes featuring structural renderings of fruit, flowers, and other everyday objects, often abstracted and set against a rich, black background; but he is also noted for his significant industrial landscape series that began in the early 1980s entitled the Disaster Paintings, on which the artist worked for nearly a decade. While Sultan's still lifes depict and strengthen fragile and ephemeral objects, the Disaster Paintings often illustrate robust, man-made structures, such as factories and train cars, that exhibit a level of fragility in their propensity to be unhinged by catastrophic events. Distinguished for combining such subject matter with industrial materials, such as tar and Masonite tiles, the Disaster Paintings exemplify in both media and concept the vulnerability of the most progressive manufactured elements of modern culture.
 
Sultan's Disaster Paintings are renowned for their sensitivity to natural and man-made events in a modern, postindustrial age. The paintings are large-scale and demonstrate great physicality in the artistic process, subject matter, and finished form. Sultan's series comprises a confluence of seeming dichotomies, merging the industrial materials of Minimalism with representational painting, stylistically combining figuration and abstraction, and making references to high and low culture, ranging from topical events to art historical iconography. Featuring a wide array of disasters as subject matter, such as forest fires, railway accidents, arson, and factories producing toxic plumes, the Disaster Paintings eternalize the real-life modern events we are faced with daily in contemporary society yet quickly forget when the next catastrophe occurs. Hearst states, "Given today's ongoing news events, the paintings are as pertinent today as when they were produced three decades ago; furthermore, it is a timely moment in history for The Disaster Paintings to be reconsidered."
 
Donald Sultan was born in 1951 in Asheville, North Carolina, and lives and works in New York. He received a BFA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1973 and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1975. Sultan has exhibited extensively, both nationally and internationally. He has had solo exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum; Contemporary Arts Museum Houston; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and The Museum of Modern Art, New York, to name only a few. The Disaster Paintings are in many prominent public collections, including the Broad Museum, Los Angeles; Cincinnati Art Museum; Cleveland Museum of Art; Dallas Museum of Art; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh; and Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, New York.
 
The show is accompanied by a richly illustrated book published by Prestel and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, which features the series in its entirety for the first time. The hardcover publication includes an interview between Sultan and Hearst, and essays by the poet Max Blagg and Charles Wylie, Curator of Photography and New Media, Santa Barbara Museum of Art.
 
 
For a checklist, high-resolution images, or to schedule an interview, please e-mail the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, info@themodern.org.

LOCATION

Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth
3200 Darnell Street
Fort Worth, Texas 76107
Telephone 817.738.9215
Toll-Free 1.866.824.5566
Fax 817.735.1161 
www.themodern.org
 
Museum Gallery Hours
Tue 10 am-7 pm (Sep-Nov, Feb-Apr, Jun-Jul)
Tue-Sun 10 am-5 pm
Fri 10 am-8 pm
 
General Admission Prices (includes special exhibitions)
$4 for students with ID and seniors (60+)
$10 for adults (13+)
Free for children 12 and under
Free for Modern members
Free every Sunday and half-price every Wednesday.
 
CAFÉ MODERN
Lunch
Tue-Fri 11 am-2:30 pm
Brunch
Sat-Sun 10 am-3 pm
Dinner
Fri 5 pm-8:30 pm
Coffee, snacks, and dessert 10 am-4:30 pm

 
The Museum is closed Mondays and holidays, including New Year's Day, Independence Day, Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve, and Christmas.   

 

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