Donald Sultan — Blues and Silvers For Sale

Blues and Silvers | Donald Sultan | Guy Hepner, New York

Market Performance

Works in the Blues and Silvers series have achieved strong results at auction. Blues and Blacks has realised US$24,308, making it among his highest-performing print editions. Seven Blues achieved US$15,360. Seven Silvers Jan. 24 has traded at US$7,095 at Phillips.

About the Series

Donald Sultan, born in Asheville, North Carolina in 1951, built his reputation on large-scale still life paintings made with industrial materials — tar, enamel, spackle, and vinyl tile laid onto Masonite rather than canvas. That same material vocabulary carries through into his print practice, where Sultan translates the layered, gouged surfaces of his paintings into color silkscreens combining enamel inks, flocking, and a distinctive tar-like texture on heavy museum board.

Blues and Silvers applies a cooler, more nocturnal palette to Sultan's flower imagery, a deliberate departure from the warmer reds and yellows of series such as Poppies and Lantern Flowers. Prints including Seven Blues and Seven Silvers (dated Jan. 24, 2024) measure 58 x 58 inches and were issued in editions of 30, each signed and dated by the artist in pencil in the margin.

The blue and silver tones lend these works a low-light, almost nocturnal quality — flowers rendered not in the bold, saturated register most associated with Sultan's work, but simplified toward near-abstraction, their forms reduced to graphic silhouettes against fields of restrained colour. The series includes both single-colour works and more complex multi-register compositions, among them the Blues and Blacks group, whose stark tonal contrast makes it one of the most formally direct and visually forceful print editions in Sultan's still-life vocabulary. For collectors already familiar with the warmth of his Poppies, Blues and Silvers offers a cooler, more contemplative counterpoint within the same body of work.