NEW YORK, NY.- Ryan Lee is presenting Donald Sultan: New Paintings, an exhibition of work made in the last two years. Sultan, who first rose to prominence during the 1980s, has challenged the boundaries between painting and sculpture throughout his career. Using industrial materials such as roofing tar, aluminum, linoleum and enamel, Sultan layers, gouges, sands and constructs his paintings—sumptuous, richly textured compositions often made of the same materials as the rooms in which they are displayed. This is Sultan’s second solo painting exhibition at Ryan Lee.

In this new series of paintings, Sultan expands his exploration of the industrialization of nature, interrogating the transformation of natural elements such as fruit and flowers into iconography for consumption, whether as fine art or manufactured goods. The image of a “button poppy”— a hybrid shape that melds the plastic button and remembrance poppy motifs developed by Sultan in works from the late 1990s through the mid-2000s—appears throughout the exhibition. Rendered in slick monochrome enamel, the button poppies appear highly plastic, heightening the synthetic quality of the form itself, and suggesting its relationship to the world of manufactured goods.

Sultan’s use of background patterning reinforces this as well; he takes his color palette from vintage automobiles such as the 1959 Bel Air (both the full-size car and its miniature model versions), and his compositional grids from fabric design such as plaid and hounds-tooth. Several paintings make reference to Modernism, drawing on familiar patterns and colors from early- and mid-twentieth century works of art. Sultan’s allusions to Piet Mondrian’s (1872-1944) recognizable mode of abstraction respond to that artist’s appropriation by the world of fashion, pointing to the transformation of highly theoretical works of art into something mass-produced.