art'otel budapest, by park plaza

Born the son of a tire dealer in 1951 in Asheville, North Carolina, Donald Sultan moved to New York after completing his studies in art in Chicago in order to start his career as an artist. In those days, young artists were often advised not to get involved in painting, purportedly an outmoded form of representation.

But Sultan still chose to paint, and he got involved in the controversy surrounding painting. A group of abstract expressionists headed by Jackson Pollock advocated largely abstract, personal and spontaneous painting; for another group known as minimalists, painting had to do with canvas and colour; it could not refer to things beyond them. In their rigorously composed colour-field painting, they stressed the object and character of their works.

Within this field of tension, Donald Sultan began to forge his own way, searching for opportunities to combine the demands of the minimalists with traditional painting. Using typical off-the-shelf linoleum tiles, he discovered a material that was congenial to the realisation of his ideas. He abandoned the traditional canvas, glued the standard sized tiles to plywood, covered them with a layer of tar and cut forms out of this tough black mass, which he then filled with colour.

In the collection at art'otel budapest, you can see works from his three central thematic fields: the "Industrials," the "Naturals," and the "Artificials."