New Paintings

Chris Sharp Gallery is pleased to present Altoon Sultan’s second solo show at the gallery. 

A formalist in the classical sense, Altoon Sultan is an artist who is interested in composition, color, spatial relationships, and light. No matter what she has depicted, whether it be Victorian architecture, modern agricultural landscapes or details of farming machinery, what she creates is deeply engaged in long-standing discussions of form, line, representation and abstraction. Having originally studied with Philip Pearlstein and Lois Dodd in the late 60s and early 70s, she comes from a tradition of representation whose interest in capturing perceived reality is second only to its stringent, vivid and precise interpretation of it. What is more, if she is working in the legacy of modernism, it has more to do with the likes of Ellsworth Kelly than any kind of Greenbergian purity, in that although she might insist on the primacy of form, what she portrays is thoroughly embedded in our shared, everyday reality.

For her second exhibition at Chris Sharp Gallery, Sultan presents a series of new egg tempera paintings on calfskin parchment. In keeping with her interest in industrial farming and the production of food, the imagery in the work consists of details of agricultural implements and machinery. Based on photos that the artist takes herself in the summer, the resultant images can be considered readymade representational abstractions in which even the choice of colors comes from “nature.” Isolated and zeroed-in upon, the portrayed details all but withdraw into illusory approximations of pure form, like so many lines, angles and circles. It is as if this essential, but often unseen, industrial-scale production of food (farming) was at once revealed and, paradoxically, restored to the relative mystery in which it exists for most of us. At once straightforward and strange, her compact, exquisitely crafted pictures possess a bright, jewel-like quality. Their milky luminosity and chalky surfaces combine to generate works which are unique among contemporary painting. As such, they are the hard-won result of decades of the daily habit of painting which testify to an artist at the height of her powers.