Altoon Sultan

Tibor de Nagy Gallery is pleased to present recent egg tempera paintings by Altoon Sultan. The show will comprise fifteen works, all painted from Dairy farms in rural Vermont, where the artist has lived for the last decade.

In her new body of work, the artist continues to explore the intersection of realism and abstraction in painting. While farm machinery is a subject she has painted in the past within a larger landscape, in the new work she pushes the boundaries of the images out to the edge of the paintings. In doing so she creates dramatic close-up views often set against a crisp blue sky that come very close to pure abstraction. Some read as still lifes, others like strange creatures, body metaphors evidenced in painting titles such as “Pump Arm” or “Red Cap.”

The artist’s growing interest in photography as it informs and relates to her own work is evident in her new paintings. Photographs of her subject provide specific information to work from once back in the studio and become the underpinning of the entire series of works. Like Charles Sheeler before her, whose work the artist greatly admires, the camera changed the way she looked for motifs to paint, dispensing with sweeping landscapes in favor of tight fragments and details.

Altoon Sultan received her BA and Masters of Fine Art from Brooklyn College and attended Skowhegan. She has had numerous one-person exhibitions in the United States and abroad. Her work is in many major museum collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Art, Boston. Sultan lives in Groton, Vermont.