Mary Ryan Gallery is pleased to announce Flowers, showcasing drawings, prints, and two small sculptures by Donald Sultan (b. 1951 Asheville, NC). A master of a variety of mediums, works on view in this exhibition incorporate charcoal, silkscreen, flocking, woodcut, gouache, gold leaf, and conté, among others.

The exhibition opens in tandem with the new monograph Donald Sultan: flowers, which will be published by Rizzoli in November 2026. Essays by Susan Tallman and Edith Devaney delve deep into the artist’s practice and illuminate his work as never before.

Sultan has returned to the subject of flowers repeatedly over the years, depicting tulips, sunflowers, mimosas, lantern flowers, poppies, and freesia. The earliest work in the show, Black tulip June 26 1983, borrows its unexpected color from his iconic Black Lemons series in which he eliminates the flower’s bright color in favor of simplicity and texture. The most recent work is two sets of Double poppies silkscreens, in pink and white.

Incorporating handmade paper, paper pulp, and flocking, Five blue flowers with flocked center, March 10, 2002 is a marvel of texture, pattern, and bold color. The blue poppies nearly transform into abstracted shapes, anchored by their black centers. The black and white woodcut motif fills the negative space between the petals.

The sculpture White tulips and vase, April 4, 2014 is simultaneously organic and geometric, making powerful use of both negative and positive space. A master of the meaningful line, Sultan draws attention to the ineffable elegance of the oval-blossomed flowers as they gracefully arch down to the base. The artist keeps one of his Tulips sculptures on his own kitchen table and says, “I love these tulips. I never have to water them.”

Susan Tallman writes in the monograph, “The flowers that interested him were not plucked in wilderness, they were commodities shaped over centuries to accommodate human tastes and maximize economies of scale. His preferred materials and methods have always blended the mass-produced and the manual. Printmaking suits him because it wears its industrial pedigree on its sleeve, but it’s the artist’s hand that extends from the cuff.”

Sultan’s flowers range from delicate to bold, from fuzzy softness to sharp edges, from precise detail to nearly abstract forms. The artist says, “I try to pare down the images to their essence, and capture the fleeting aspect of reality by pitting the gesture against the geometric—the gesture being the fluidity of the human against the geometry of the object.”