McClain Gallery is pleased to announce our second solo exhibition of New York artist Donald Sultan titled New Mimosa Paintings, featuring Sultan’s recent series based on the yellow-flowering Mimosa plant found in the French Riviera–the plant famously blooms early in the season with heavily loaded racemes of puffy yellow flowers. The exhibition highlights the artist’s gestural drawings and materially complex paintings. His exploration of graceful, arching compositions combines traditional art materials like graphite and Conté with industrial cement, enamel, and tar.
The mimosa plant manifests as an extension of the artist’s hand. As delicate branches unfurl in calligraphic clusters, mimosa blossoms cling to the boughs, trembling at the edge of budding. Sultan often improvises his compositions, preferring to get lost in the rhythm found in his studio. In his large-scale drawing Autumn Mimosa with Anomalies Sept 24 2025, the shape and body of the vegetation curls and cascades with gestural motion from the top edge of the page and comes together at the center of the work. Sultan approaches his paintings on masonite with the same gestures, creating haphazard blueprints in graphite which he then activates with vivid hues and lustrous silvers, using masks and thick materials to build the surface up.
Sultan’s body of work is influenced by how mimosa flowers are exchanged as a token of love and become a botanical spectacle. “[The paintings] are supposed to be stages… they are theater,” Sultan states. Strikingly, all of his paintings are left with exposed sides, so viewers can observe “backstage,” the artist describes. What results is a departure from typical paintings on canvas. Rather, the artwork stands off the wall, summoning the same suspension of disbelief demanded by set design. Simultaneously, Sultan leans heavily into abstract expressionist roots. Similar to Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings, small peekaboos of vibrant red, yellow, and turquoise poke through, tucked behind the rounded forms of flowers. Sultan’s Silver and White Mimosa June 27 2025 demonstrates the technique as colorful paint strokes are framed by a metallic glow. Both artists define a picture plane consumed by all-over abstraction that is rooted in nature.
Other paintings by Sultan lean far more monochromatic, relying on repetition, geometric outline, and monumental scale, heightened by the endless number of blossoms pressing toward the viewer. Despite embracing a degree of minimalism, Sultan declares the paintings have “a strong, powerful presence,” almost as if the mimosa blooms obey no order but their own. Exploring both nature and artificiality, “[Sultan tries] to pare down the images to their essence, and capture the fleeting aspect of reality by pitting the gesture against the geometric.” Sultan states that, at a certain point, “I lose the ability to impose my will on the paintings,” especially as the mimosa overwhelms the very structure meant to contain it.
DONALD SULTAN (b. 1951 Asheville, NC) is an artist who rose to prominence in the late 1970s as part of the New Image movement. Sultan studied at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and later received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He lives and works in New York, NY.
His work is included in the collections of the Addison Gallery of American Art, MA; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, NY; Art Institute of Chicago, IL; Bank of America Collection; British Museum, London; Cleveland Art Museum, OH; Denver Art Museum, CO; Detroit Institute of Arts, MI; Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University, MA; High Museum of Art, GA; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Ludwig Museum, Budapest; Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, TX; Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, CA; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Museum of Modern Art, NY; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Nelson-Atkins Museum, MO; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, PA; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; Singapore Museum of Art, Singapore; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY; St. Louis Art Museum, MO; Tate Gallery, London; Toledo Museum of Art, OH; Walker Art Center, MN; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY.
New Mimosa Paintings marks Donald Sultan's second solo exhibition with McClain Gallery, after a first in 2024. He has exhibited worldwide in landmark solo and group exhibitions.