After receiving an MFA degree from the Art Institute of Chicago, Donald Sultan moved to New York in 1975 to begin his career as an artist. At first, he was supporting himself by helping other artists construct lofts during the day and painting at night. In 1979, Sultan won a $2,500 Creative Artists Public Service Grant from the New York State Council on the Arts, and that money enabled him to work full-time on his art. “By then I had started to show at a couple of places and to sell enough work to keep going,” he said. Donald Sultan rose to prominence in the electrified atmosphere of New York’s downtown renaissance in the late 1970s as part of the “New Image” movement. His first solo exhibition was mounted in 1977 at Artists Space in New York, followed by group shows at Mary Boone Gallery in 1978 and Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1979. As Sultan’s work started to attract media attention and receive critical acclaim, prominent galleries and museums around the world, such as the Indianapolis Museum of Art and the New York Museum of Modern Art in 1981, and the Houston Museum of Contemporary Art also in 1981, began to include his paintings in their exhibitions. In 1987 alone, impressive solo exhibitions were mounted at the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Blum Helman Gallery in New York. Reviewing these exhibitions for the New York Times, art critic Roberta Smith wrote, “Mr. Sultan is nothing if not a master of physical density, of the well-built image and the well-carpentered painting. He seems particularly to love the way an implacable slab of material can be made to flip-flop into classically perfect, illusionistic form…” In 1988, Sultan accepted a commission for an Absolut Vodka iconic art ad campaign, which began in the early 1980s when Andy Warhol created Absolut’s first commissioned artwork. Sultan’s ad shows a rough square filled with a screenprint of pimiento stuffed green olives, with a black and white aquatint image of the Absolut bottle boldly superimposed over the venter of the artwork. In 1999, Sultan was invited to have a permanent exhibition of his works in various media at the trendy new hotel in Budapest, Hungary. Aptly named Art’otel Budapest Donald Sultan, in was practically turned over to Sultan with a carte blanche to design everything from the fountains to the carpeting. He has exhibited in New York, London, Paris, Chicago, Tokyo, and Berlin, among other cities. Sultan’s work belongs in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art, the Tate, the Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, among others. Sultan is also well known for his prints and sculptures, which embrace the same motifs as his paintings.