Donald Sultan’s Disaster Paintings are among the artist’s most important and iconic works. Now on view at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (through Sept. 4), the series heads to the North Carolina Museum of Art from Sept. 23 to Dec. 31, 2017.

Each of these 11 paintings, created between 1984 and 1990, is an imposing, industrial-like structure, reinforced by Sultan’s preferred media of Masonite tiles and tar. The resilience of his materials contrasts with his subject matter: fires, floods, and industrial catastrophes, which provoke feelings of fear, instability, and frailty. These large-scale paintings, most of which measure eight feet square, are heavy and dense, bringing a serious permanence to calamities that are often over in a flash. Sultan’s images force us to confront the realities of contemporary life and dare us to remember the long-term effects of each accident or reaction. 

Sultan’s career began with his first solo exhibition in 1977 in New York City, when he was just 26 years old, and he rose to prominence in the 1980s. A painter, sculptor, and printmaker, Sultan is regarded for his ongoing large-scale painted still lifes featuring structural renderings of fruit, flowers, and other everyday objects, often abstracted and set against a rich, black background; but he is also noted for his significant industrial landscape series that began in the early 1980s entitled the Disaster Paintings, on which the artist worked for nearly a decade. While Sultan’s still lifes depict and strengthen fragile and ephemeral objects, the Disaster Paintings often illustrate robust, man-made structures, such as industrial plants and train cars, that exhibit a level of fragility in their propensity to be unhinged by catastrophic events. Distinguished for combining such subject matter with industrial materials, such as tar and Masonite tiles, the Disaster Paintings exemplify in both media and concept the vulnerability of the most progressive manufactured elements of modern culture.

Sultan’s Disaster Paintings are renowned for their sensitivity to natural and man-made events in a modern, postindustrial age. The paintings are large-scale and demonstrate great physicality in the artistic process, subject matter, and finished form. Sultan’s series comprises a confluence of seeming dichotomies, merging the industrial materials of Minimalism with representational painting, stylistically combining figuration and abstraction, and making references to high and low culture, ranging from topical events to art historical iconography. Featuring a wide array of disasters as subject matter, such as forest fires, railway accidents, arson, and factories producing toxic plumes, the Disaster Paintings eternalize the real-life modern events we are faced with daily in contemporary society yet quickly forget when the next catastrophe occurs. It is a timely moment in history for the Disaster Paintings to be reconsidered.

Donald Sultan: The Disaster Paintings is organized by Alison Hearst, Assistant Curator, Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. The exhibition has traveled and will make its final stop at Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln, January 24–May 13, 2018.