A painter, sculptor, and printmaker, Donald Sultan is best known for his significant industrial landscape series, the Disaster Paintings, which he began in the 1980s and worked on for nearly a decade. This series often illustrates robust, man-made structures and objects, such as manufacturing plants and train cars, which can, conversely, exhibit a level of fragility in their propensity to be unhinged by catastrophic events. Distinguished by their combination of such subject matter with industrial materials like tar and Masonite tiles, the Disaster Paintings exemplify in both concept and media the vulnerability of the most progressive fabricated elements of modern culture. Featuring a wide array of disasters, including fires, accidents, and pollution, the Disaster Paintings eternalize the real-life modern events we are faced with daily in contemporary society yet quickly forget about when the next catastrophe occurs.
This catalogue is published on the occasion of the exhibition Donald Sultan: The Disaster Paintings, organized by the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.
