A critically important series in the oeuvre of American painter, sculptor, and printmaker Donald Sultan, The Disaster Paintings were created between 1984 and 1990. These works feature imposing, man-made structures, whose industrial qualities are reinforced by Sultan's preferred media, Masonite tiles and tar. The paintings' resulting sense of robust permanence is offset by the catastrophes Sultan includes therein, which provoke a jarring sense of fragility, impermanence, and transience. Such unexpected juxtapositions are privileged by the artist's process itself, which merges the industrial materials of Minimalism with representational painting, stylistically combining figuration and abstraction and making simultaneous reference to high and low culture. Painted on a large scale (the majority of the works in this series measure 8' x 8'), The Disaster Paintings embody great physicality in their process, subject matter, and finished form. They also reify the modern experience of industrialized societies with images of fire, accidents, and industrial mishaps, daring us to forget that calamities and adversity are woven into the very fabric of our existence. It is a timely moment in history to reconsider and reassess The Disaster Paintings. - Published to accompany the exhibition of the same name held at Lowe Art Museum, Coral Gables, Florida, 29th September-23rd December 2016; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas, February-April 2017; and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC, May 26-September 4, 2017.

A poetic depiction of what keeps you warm when it is cold, from good clothes and steam to the sound of talk and the love that you keep with you wherever you go.

"...The 84 aquatints, screenprints, and etchings presented in this volume demonstrate the wide range of the artist's printing techniques and materials and comprise a survey of Sultan's printmaking output from 1979 to 1991..."--Back cover

"American painter, sculptor, and print maker Donald Sultan rose to prominence in the electrified atmosphere of New York's downtown art renaissance in the late 1970S and 1980s. Before the use of graffiti and post-modern figuration appeared in the galleries and art magazines, Sultan's simple iconography and complex technique of gouged, spackled, and painted tar-encrusted grids of linoleum tiles attached to Masonite captured immediate and enthusiastic attention. The works were abstract, erotic, and powerful." "Donald Sultan: The Theater of the Object is the first comprehensive monograph of the artist's distinguished 30-year career. Through the years, Sultan has become a master printmaker as well as a painter and draftsman. This book provides important examples of each medium and is divided into his abiding preoccupations with the industrial, artificial, and natural worlds, and offers insightful comparisons of the marriage of method and image. In 1987 Sultan told art critic Barbara Rose that his mission as an artist was "to haul painting into the 21st century." Now, almost a decade into that century, it is a perfect moment to review his progress. Today, Sultan's work can be found in more than fifty museums worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, The Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Tate Modern in London. Influenced by artists from Sasetta to Manet, Weston to Warhol, Sultan uses architectonic painting structures as the vehicle for advancing his mission."--BOOK JACKET.

First published in 1992 to wide critical acclaim, Pictures From Home is Larry Sultan's pendant to his parents. Sultan returned home to Southern California periodically in the 1980s and the decade-long sequence moves between registers, combining contemporary photographs with film stills from home movies, fragments of conversation, Sultan's own writings and other memorabilia. The result is a narrative collage in which the boundary between the documentary and the staged becomes increasingly ambiguous. Simultaneously the distance usually maintained between the photographer and his subjects also slips in an exchange of dialogue and emotion that is unique to this work. Significantly increasing the page count of the original book, this MACK design of Pictures From Home clarifies the multiplicity of voices - both textual and pictorial - in order to afford a fresh perspective of this seminal body of work -- Provided by the publisher.