Framing Nature’s Paradox Neil Jenney & Donald Sultan, 1969-2023 by morrismuseum

Neil Jenney Donald Sultan

Fra m i n g N a t u re ’s Pa ra d ox Neil Jenney Donald Sultan 1969 - 2023

Foreword The Morris Museum is fortunate to present Framing Nature’s Paradox: Neil Jenney & Donald Sultan, 1969-2023 as part of a host of projects and programs showcasing artists whose work delves into the intersection of contemporary practice with keen observation of the natural world and human nature. These two highly acclaimed artists came to prominence in the 1960s and 1970s in New York City and are admirers of each other’s work. Each is a prominent exponent in the global conversation about the art of our time. Their work is found at leading institutions and in significant private collections worldwide. The critical press and popular media have heralded their accomplishments over the years, sometimes referring to them as post-minimalist mavericks and pioneers. Yet this is the first museum exhibition to consider them together by exploring their early output and new approaches to realism. Bold in their imagery and often massive in their physical presence, the works on view beckon us to look again. We see their artistic choices and the combination of brawn and finesse they are known for. It is interesting to consider that neither artist sees their work as painting per se. Rather, Sultan’s painterprintmaker mind and masterful draftsmanship rightly have been understood as sculptural in their techniques and materiality. Jenney refers to his works as painted sculptures instead of paintings and prides himself on making their integrated frames and slogan-like titles part of his creation. While the selections in this project give the visitor a glimpse of the artists’ shared fascination with the world as we observe it, it would be a mistake to think of them as chroniclers of our shared landscape. Nothing in their work strives for an authentic or mimetic representation of those environments, and they honor artifice and abstraction uniquely. Vistas,

figures, and flora are unapologetically constructed and physically wrought. Sultan’s work’s sheer scale and industrial materials belies their organic subject. In Jenney’s, we are snapped back from believable scenes by witty titles and abstracted forms. Mounting such an exhibition in any given year would be a laudable contribution to understanding these adroit artists across five decades of work. Pairing them, without juxtaposing them literally, is an invitation to see their creations with fresh eyes. Organizing and creating this exhibition has been a great joy and the work of generous collaborators. The Museum’s board of directors responded to the idea with instant enthusiasm and trust in the concept. Both artists opened their studios to us—physically and intellectually and with the generous loans of their works. Our common friend, Waqas Wajahat, extended his trust and friendship to the project and lent his team, particularly Sanne Schouten, to help realize the exhibition with alacrity. My team at the Museum, especially curator Michelle Graves and her colleagues within the collections and exhibitions staff, leaped at this opportunity with energy and a commitment to shaping an in-gallery experience, befitting the bold art on display. John Ravenal, who has written on both artists individually, embraced the idea of bringing them together. His insightful essay combines shared themes between the two artists and contrasting approaches, from Minimalism to contemporary painting, each eventually developing their own material vocabulary and visual spectra. To all of these and the many others whose work led to the exhibition and catalog’s realization, our great thanks. Thomas J. Loughman Executive Director, September 2023

Neil Jenney Stop and Spades, 1970 Acrylic on canvas in artist’s frame 58.5 x 83.3 inches 148.6 x 211.6 cm

Donald Sultan Morning Glories March 28 1991 Oil and spackle on tile over Masonite 96 x 96 inches 243.8 x 243.8 cm 2

Neil Jenney Vexation and Rapture, 1969 Acrylic on canvas in artist’s frame 62.3 x 83.5 x 3 inches 158.2 x 212.1 x 7.6 cm

Donald Sultan Steers March 2 1983 Butyl rubber, plaster, chalk, and oil stick on tile 96 x 96 inches 243.8 x 243.8 cm

Neil Jenney Animals and Environments, 1969 Acrylic on canvas 58 x 76 x 3.75 inches 147.3 x 193 x 9.5 cm

Donald Sultan Lemons and Pears November 6 1984 Oil, spackle, and tar on tile over wood 12 x 12 inches 30.5 x 30.5 cm

Donald Sultan Lemon November 3 1983 Oil, spackle, and tar on tile over wood 12 x 12 inches 30.5 x 30.5 cm

Donald Sultan Lemon Limes and Egg May 2 1985 Oil, spackle, and tar on tile over wood 12 x 12 inches 30.5 x 30.5 cm

Donald Sultan Lemon January 19 1989 Oil, spackle, and tar on tile over wood 12 x 12 inches 30.5 x 30.5 cm

Donald Sultan Peppers March 13 1988 Oil, spackle, and tar on tile over wood 12 x 12 inches 30.5 x 30.5 cm

Donald Sultan Lemons Apples and Pear March 11 1985 Oil, spackle, and tar on tile over wood 12 x 12 inches 30.5 x 30.5 cm

Donald Sultan Still Life with Bug March 8 1993 Oil, spackle, and tar on tile over wood 12 x 12 inches 30.5 x 30.5 cm

Donald Sultan Black Lemon and Almonds Nov 10 1986 Oil, spackle, and tar on tile over wood 12 x 12 inches 30.5 x 30.5 cm 12

Neil Jenney Wonder and Fear, 2019 Acrylic on canvas in artist’s frame 55 x 75 inches 139.7 x 190.5 cm

Donald Sultan Six Aqua Poppies July 3 2004 Enamel, flock, tar, and spackle on tile over Masonite 96 x 144 inches 243.8 x 365.75 cm

Neil Jenney Leftway + Rightway, 1970/2022 Oil on canvas 48 x 86.75 x 3 inches 121.9 x 220.3 x 7.6 cm

Neil Jenney NA Vegetae, 2022/2023 Oil on wood 25.5 x 113 x 3.5 inches 64.8 x 287 x 8.9 cm

Donald Sultan Japanese Pines April 16 2007 Tar and spackle on Masonite 96 x 144 inches 243.8 x 365.75 cm

Neil Jenney Texting and Talking, 2023 Oil on canvas in artist’s frame 68 x 48.5 x 3 inches 172.7 x 123.2 x 7.6 cm

Neil Jenney Donald Sultan Constructing Nature

John B. Ravenal

At a time a half century ago, when the leading edge of contemporary art aligned with Minimalist sculpture and Conceptual art, the practice of painting seemed on the verge of collapse—too mired in conventions of illusion, narrative, composition, and emotional expression to serve the present moment. Radically reductive experiments based in the Modernist imperative to shed all that was extrinsic to the medium had pushed painting to the edge of dematerialization—as with Robert Ryman’s stark white monochromes adhered directly to the wall and Agnes Martin’s austere penciled grids on canvas. At the other end of the spectrum, the ascendency of a wide range of new media such as video, performance, and earth art, many of which blurred boundaries by taking painting as a springboard, threatened to erode painting’s identity as a distinct medium.1 This is the context in which Neil Jenney and Donald Sultan came of age as artists. Along with their peers, Jenney and Sultan not only maintained a commitment to painting but also sought to reintroduce recognizable subject matter into their work.2 But this was no simple return to an earlier embrace of representational art. Several notable exhibitions of the late 1970s sought to codify this new direction, including New Image Painters at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, both of which included Jenney, and Visionary Images at the Renaissance Society, which included Sultan.3 Linking artists as diverse in their approaches and imagery as Jennifer Bartlett, Jonathan Borofsky, Joan Brown, and Julian Schnabel, these exhibitions teased out connecting threads among a new generation of post-minimalist painters. In embracing a kind of a de-skilled aesthetics and a predilection for free-floating objects and figures, these artists offered 1

schematized, semi-abstract images, described by one leading critic as “emblematic figuration.”4 Jenney and Sultan, like their peers, also sought to reconcile the return to imagery with the advances of their immediate predecessors—in particular the Minimalist stricture that painting emphasize its physical presence or “objecthood,” as Michael Fried famously described it.5 In the 1960s, works such as Robert Morris’s L-beams and Donald Judd’s plywood boxes had purged art of metaphor, allusion, and subjectivity. As Frank Stella had said in 1964, “What you see is what you see.”6 The work called attention only to itself and to the “circumstances in which the beholder encounters” it,7 rather than pointing to content beyond the viewer’s immediate environment. In Jenney’s seminal paintings of 1969-70, the influence of this objective, literalist approach manifested as a fast, loose style of brushwork that he called his Bad Paintings, after the title of the New Museum exhibition (pp. 1, 4). Drained of the emotive urgency of Willem de Kooning or Franz Kline’s heroic abstraction, Jenney’s strokes were workmanlike and “unconcerned,” as he first called them: spontaneous yet purposeful. Rejecting the drive to expose one’s inner self or overcome an existential void, his brushwork was instead guided by the need to fill space around his figures with a semblance of spatial context. Adding to this emphasis on the work as the product of ordinary physical labor, Jenney surrounded his images with thick black frames that he built himself, each sporting the title of the work in bold, sanserif lettering beneath the image. The Bad Paintings generally feature pairs of objects or figures, often in cause-and-effect

See Douglas Crimp, “The End of Painting,” October 16 (Spring, 1981), 69-86.

2 It should be noted that Jenney began his career as a sculptor and took part in several important sculpture exhibitions before turning to painting and Sultan’s early painting was fully abstract. 3 New Image Painting, Whitney Museum of American Art, December 6, 1978–January 28, 1979; “Bad” Painting, The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, January 14–February 28, 1978; Visionary Images, The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, May 6–June 16, 1979. 4

Carter Ratcliff, “Emblematic Figuration,” in Visionary Images (Chicago: The Renaissance Society, 1979), 3.

Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” in Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1968), 116-147.

“Questions to Stella and Judd, Interview by Bruce Glaser,” in Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, 158.

Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” 125. 32

or oppositional relationships, as underscored by the stenciled titles: Them and Us, Threat and Sanctuary, Vexation and Rapture. Nature in these works is rendered as generalized, all-over fields with out-of-the-tube colors of green for grass, blue for water or sky, and brown for dirt.

intensity of their depiction recalls Northern Renaissance painting, like a van der Weyden Deposition minus all but the top of the cross.

Over the next few years, Jenney’s frames became wider, deeper, and more elaborate, taking on the character of classical architecture—an evolution that coincided with his move toward a tighter realist style he calls the Good Paintings, which he began in 1971. Reflecting his earlycareer focus on sculpture, Jenney has said he considers all his paintings to be “painted sculpture,”8 underscoring their object status. With the Good Paintings, this claim became more pronounced. Jenney understood framing as functional rather than decorative, and has said he builds the frames first, then paints the images.9 The frames serve as an architectural foreground for the panoramic bands (pp. 43-44) or small opening that punch illusionistic holes in the dark surrounds. We instinctively read these as glimpses out a window or other opening (some suggest a bunker slot).

After more than four decades of Good Paintings, Jenney embarked on a new body of work, the New Good Paintings, distinguished from the prior work by using canvas as opposed to wood panel, often having the titles run vertically along the sides—which Jenney calls “marquee titles”—rather than across the bottom, and imagery derived from imagination rather than direct observation. Part of this new body of work, the Modern Africa series, begun in 2015, is still tied to landscape, but now featuring views of an extinguished culture sinking back into the desert, with sculptural and architectural elements half buried in the sand. Footsteps imply human presence, though the tightly cropped scenes limit our view to the foreground. The parched, empty settings reflect Jenney’s longstanding concern with the degradation of the environment, but these images also offer more generalized meditations on the unrelenting passage of time and the perpetual clash between nature and civilization.

Jenney’s frequent depiction of deep space and his careful rendering in the Good Paintings enhances this sense of looking out from the inside. The scenes idealize nature, subsuming minute brushstroke into the textures of his highly articulated forms and their local colors, whether tree, snow, or sky. Some of his works take this precision to a heightened level. In the two Tomorrow paintings (pp. 57-58), the hyper-focus created by the small openings and close-up imagery join with the detailed rendering to convey a sense of reverence, even religiousness, that imbues wooden beams, bent nails, and rusted wire with the aura of relics. While just ordinary pieces of fence, the

Jenney said about his Good Paintings that although he may not have witnessed the exact scenes he paints, the components within them are all things he knows intimately.10 The Modern Africa paintings, however, are made up, inspired by the imaginary travel book Impressions of Africa (1910) by French proto-Surrealist author Raymond Roussel. Although he traveled extensively, Roussel was known for remaining largely in his hotel room and using word-based rules and games to compose his works.11 Jenney, with very little international travel, has also created a fanciful world of his own imagining, a northern “Africa” that, while suggesting Greek, Roman,

“Neil Jenney & Waqas Wajahat in Conversation,” in Neil Jenney: 50 Years (New York: Waqas Wajahat Inc., 2022), 71.

9 “In Conversation: Neil Jenney and Michael Cary,” Gagosian Quarterly, March 10, 2022, https://gagosian.com/quarterly/2022/03/10/interview-video-neil-jenneyand-michael-cary/. 10 Douglas Dreishspoon, interview, “Neil Jenney’s Rules to Live By,” Gagosian Quarterly, Summer 2019, https://gagosian.com/quarterly/2020/01/31/interview-neiljenneys-rules-live/. 11 David S. Wallace, “How Raymond Roussel Put the Impossible on the Page,” The New Yorker, May 2, 2019, https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/howraymond-roussel-put-the-impossible-on-the-page.

and Egyptian influences, creates a new, hybrid vision—an exotic reverie that doubles as visual speculative fiction. Influenced by the isolation and fear of the Covid pandemic, Jenney recently returned to the painting style he abandoned over fifty years before.12 He calls the new body of work the New Bad Paintings. They feature the loose, energetic brushwork of the original Bad Paintings, with the same rapid execution and single layer

of translucent stroke that produces the luminous fields, though some of the new works introduce a diagonal stroke and more modulation of light and dark than in the original Bad Paintings. The new works also present similar staged confrontations between figures or objects, with the terse titles again stenciled below the images on the black frames, thinner than in the Good Paintings though still substantial. Jenney has even used the same straight-fromthe-tube paint colors as before, although aware that some

12 “Neil Jenney & Waqas Wajahat in Conversation,” 87. 34

have changed, as with the Hooker’s Green used for the grass in Wonder and Fear (p. 14). Most recently, Jenney has embarked on another new series that he calls Good Bad Paintings, combining the “this and that” format of juxtaposed elements from the Bad Paintings with the tighter, more controlled style of the Good Paintings, as in Leftway + Rightway, which he began in 1970 and completed in 2022 (pp. 17-18). For Donald Sultan on the other hand, this drive to assert the physical presence of his work led beyond traditonal materials to those of the building trade—plywood, plaster, floor tile, and roofing tar. Sultan grew up in Asheville, North Carolina, and credits the experience of working in his father’s tire business—grinding tread off old tires, putting on hot rubber, and placing them into molds—with fostering an openness to painting as an art of physical labor and common materials.13 He also worked in loft renovation after arriving in New York in 1975 and was taken with vinyl tiles and the process of heating and cutting the temporarily softened material. Pleased with their thickness and weight, he began using the 12 x 12-inch tiles as a support for paint or sometimes simply juxtaposing vinyl of disparate colors and patterns. While Sultan was evolving his method, he was also developing a repertoire of imagery. From his time in Chicago, and then in New York, he was fascinated by elements of the industrial and urban landscape—factories, smokestacks, the chasms of space between tall buildings. These forms became his early subjects. He soon began making paintings of catastrophic events and destructive forces seen in newspaper photos—terrorist bombings, chemical spills, forest fires, battleships. These expanded to include stormy landscapes with deteriorating industrial cities, which Sultan has described as “alluring images of

cold-eyed despair.”14 These are made with blue flecked vinyl tile adhered to Masonite over 4 x 4-foot plywood modules, in turn bolted to a wood frame with 3-inch steel rods. Sultan would first paint the scenes in black on the tiles, then soften those areas with a blowtorch and excavate them before filling the spaces with roofing tar. Elsewhere he applied yellow latex paint. By washing the tar with solvent, he would clean up the edges of the forms and spread a sepia film over the yellow paint, darkening the sky with sooty, Turneresque atmospherics. Raindrops May 2 1993 (p. 56) belongs to this lineage, although the sense of disaster is subordinated to an image of a dreary day in Paris. Set against the looming silhouette of a Baroque or Neoclassical building,15 a bruised sky teams with raindrops, whose lack of paint and tar reveal the tile beneath. Silkscreened views within the circles, like refracted images on a watery windowpane,16 reveal fragmented images of a sinking ferry from an accident Sultan believes happened in the Netherlands around the time he was in France.17 The massive portal-like drops pierce the sky and buildings, recalling Sultan’s interest in the apertures that Alan Saret and Gordon MattaClark carved into buildings in the 1970s—a connection reinforced by Sultan’s use of architectural materials and his physical processes of cutting, burning, and gouging. Around the time he began the industrial and disaster images, Sultan also experimented with covering his vinyl tiles completely with an even coating of tar, then heating and excavating areas that he would fill with spackle. The dark, gently textured tar skin in one early work reminded him of a hide and inspired a series of steer paintings using white oil stick to outline the bodies and unpainted spackle for the heads (p. 6). Sultan understood the steer as a hybrid: a natural being that is industrially raised, slaughtered, and

13 Donald Sultan, “Art in Progress: Donald Sultan,” part 2, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWWSfMIrzRk. 14 Donald Sultan, Donald Sultan: The Theater of the Object, (New York: The Vendome Press, 2008), 33. 15 “My studio was facing the Beaubourg with my studio facing south. I don’t remember if I invented the building or could see one like it. It may have come from a photo or a newspaper or life. . . . It might be the museum of money near the Rue Mazarine.” Emails to the author, September 12, 2023. 16 Sultan calls them raindrops on the window, refracting the light and view. Conversation with the author, September 11, 2023. 17 Email to the author, September 12, 2023.

packaged for consumption. His schematized rendering of the animal yields an immediately recognizable form that conveys the generic quality of a commercial steer, while its stark mass calls attention to the physicality of Sultan’s materials and process. Sultan’s interest in rendering things in his immediate environment—as with industrial images and the disaster scenes from the morning paper—extended to florals and still lifes. Like the steers, these domestic subjects also suggested a link between industry and nature. He had first made the connection when he began to see the flames from factory stacks as urban flowers. This led to an interest in painting actual flowers—yellow irises and tulips, with flamelike buds and petals atop structural, tower-like stalks. In reintroducing the traditional motif of florals into his art, Sultan also recognized the connection between his black tar and the deep black grounds used by historical still life and floral painters.18 Black for Sultan serves many purposes. The link to past art is important, and so is the link to the industrial present. In addition, his black grounds, spread across platforms that extend out from the wall, create a sculptural stage for his bold graphic images—what Sultan has described as a “theater of the object.”19 These black grounds resonate with Jenney’s black frames, which also serve a stagelike role by isolating his images from the surrounding environment. In both cases, this theatricality is deepened by black’s many, sometimes conflicting, associations, from restraint and modesty to wealth and power to death and mourning. Sultan’s encounter in 1983 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art with a Manet painting of a single lemon set against a dark ground20 inspired a series of still lifes, including small, single-tile compositions of lemons, eggs, and pears (pp. 11-12). These feature strong contrasts of bright and dark, with the objects often reading as both volume and

void—an effect Sultan enhanced by coating actual lemons and eggs with black paint and placing them in the still life set-ups. Although deeply interested in the connection to artistic precedents, Sultan also played up the schematic quality of his objects, including using a tracing of the same lemon over and over as he embarked on a series of monumental versions, underscoring it as a standardized, commercially produced, supermarket object. By now, Sultan had answered the question of how to reintroduce landscape, florals, and still lifes into his work—traditional genres that abstraction and Minimalism had jettisoned— by filtering them through his physical painting process and his simplified, abstracted renderings. Sultan’s interest in “natural” images soon expanded to include morning glories, oranges trees, and Japanese pines, among other subjects. But in each case, his graphic stylizations underscore repetition, simple geometries, adherence to the picture plane, and all-over dispersal. The effect is to link his flowers and trees closely to his Artificial subjects. The round white centers of his morning glories—such as Morning Glories March 28 1999 (p. 2), with its electric blue and red flowers, seen head-on and dispersed across a dense field of troweled-on green leaves—led Sultan to start painting dominoes, which in turn led to dice and buttons, all connected by dots and circles. These in turn, inform the bold round forms of his bright oranges surrounded by black tar leaves against a ground of white spackle—a reversal of his usual figure/ ground materials (p. 60). Sultan’s poppy paintings (pp. 15-16) epitomize this crossfertilization of natural and artificial. Often presented in neat rows of identical, isolated flowers, their slightly irregular petals and centers distinguish them from the morning glories. But the poppies are not derived from nature. In their frontality and repetition, they refer instead to the flat plastic pins worn in the UK and Europe on Remembrance Day to commemorate WWI dead,

18 See John B. Ravenal “Notes on Black,” in The Theater of the Object 19 The Theater of the Object, 97. 20 He visited the show with painter John Torreano, who remarked how the lemon looked like his tulip buds, The Theater of the Object, 97. The painting is in the collection of the Musée d’Orsay. See Brigitte Baer, Donald Sultan’s Black Lemons (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1988), unpaginated. 38

inspired by the war poem “In Flanders Fields” and the poppies that sprang up on the battlefields of Belgium and France. Begun around 2007, Sultan’s Japanese pine paintings are, like his poppies, also a re-representation. His pines come from the only scenic image that appears in Noh theater. Called the Oimatsu, it is a round-leafed pine painted

on the stage’s back wall and is said to be modeled on an ancient tree still standing at the Kasugataisha Shrine in Nara. In Sultan’s images (p. 25-26) the clustered needles coalesce into his familiar circles, here in bright white spackle. He contrasts the smooth round forms with scraped tar branches and a tar ground chiseled with long horizontal gouges to recall Japanese woodblock prints. The rectangular format of the work, different than his

usual 8-foot square, recalls a theater backdrop, and underscores the landscape subject. Painted around the same time, Chinese Lanterns July 12 2007, (pp. 61-62), uses similar methods, but with the floral and calligraphic elements silkscreened over washes of enamel paint to make hanging lanterns. For a more recent series, Sultan turned to the mimosa plant, found around the world, often with delicate, fluffy yellow flowers and also shades of fuchsia and magenta.21 Sultan’s Mimosas introduce a lighter palette and a new material into his work. He had experimented with cement in the 1970s, before working with vinyl tile and tar.22 In 2021 he returned to a fine grit cement, bought in tubes made for repairing cracks in floors and walls. Yellow Mimosa with Two Anomalies May 28 2022 (p. 48), like most of the works in the series, is a complex, multilayered construct, beginning with a bright white ground over which he applies dot stickers to mask out areas of blossoms. A layer of drawing and graphite powder remains visible behind and on top of these forms, as does a patch of blue at the top indicating sky. Cement troweled into the cutouts within a layer of masking film creates the gray leaves, while in other areas he removes many of the circular dots and paints them with thinned enamel— including a few in silver that read as both object and void, like his early lemons. It is a compelling all-over field of contrasting colors and shapes, textures and finishes, that create what Tom Loughman described as a “sensation. . . of immersion and embrace”23 as they cascade across the surface.

this to a modernist art that, in defeating objecthood, aspired to “presentness and instantaneousness,”24 which he likened to a moment of grace, where viewers transcend their self-awareness for immersion in the work. Jenney and Sultan seem to have embraced theatricality in both its senses. They assert the physical, sculptural presence of their work—its fundamental status as a constructed object existing in the viewer’s space: Jenny with his matterof-fact Bad Painting brushwork and his massive frames, and Sultan with his platform-like structures and nonart materials. But they also invite immersion into their visual worlds, whether Jenney’s idealized views beyond the architectural setting or Sultan’s boldly stylized fields of graphic images. Theirs is a theatricality that balances artifice and nature, giving us both the working mechanics and the fullness of the experience of their constructed views of nature.

John B. Ravenal is an independent curator and art historian. He served as a curator at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and Wadsworth Atheneum. He was most recently Executive Director of deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum.

When Michael Fried used the term theatrical for Minimalist art, he meant to criticize what he saw as the new sculpture’s obtrusive, even aggressive, stage presence that demands the work be taken into account. He juxtaposed 21 Sultan encountered them along the roads of the Alpes-Maritimes region of the French Riviera, Tom Loughman, “Cultivating Artifice,” in Donald Sultan: The Nature of Things, (New York: Ryan Lee, 2022), 4. But he also tells of having been sent an envelope of mimosa flowers some ten years earlier by a friend in the south of France. Jordan Karney Chaim, “Meditations on Gravity: Donald Sultan’s Mimosas,” in Donald Sultan: Mimosa, Paintings & Drawings (New York: Ryan Lee Gallery, 2019), 5. 22 Conversation with the author, September 11, 2023. 23 Loughman, “Cultivating Artifice,” 3. 24 Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” 146. 40

Neil Jenney NA Vegetae, 2006–07 Oil on wood in artist’s frame 25.375 x 113 x 2.75 inches 64.45 x 287 x 7 cm

Donald Sultan Yellow Mimosa with Two Anomalies May 28 2022 Enamel, cement, acrylic, and graphite on Masonite 72 x 96 inches 182.3 x 243.8 cm

Neil Jenney North America Depicted, 2010 Oil on canvas in artist’s frame 25.375 x 113 x 2.75 inches 64.5 x 287 x 7 cm

Neil Jenney North America Divided, 2004 Oil on canvas in artist’s frame 25.5 x 113.5 x 2.75 inches 64.8 x 288 x 7 cm

Donald Sultan Raindrops May 2 1993 Tar, oil, latex, spackle, and silkscreen on tile over Masonite 96 x 96 inches 243.8 x 243.8 cm

Neil Jenney Tomorrow I, 2012 Oil on wood in artist’s frame 21.25 x 32.125 x 2.5 inches 54 x 81.6 x 6.4 cm

Neil Jenney Tomorrow II, 2013 Oil on wood in artist’s frame 22.75 x 32.5 x 2.5 inches 57.8 x 82.6 x 6.35 cm 58

Donald Sultan Fifteen Oranges September 17 1992 Tar, oil, and spackle on tile over Masonite 96 x 96 inches 243.8 x 243.8 cm

Donald Sultan Chinese Lanterns July 12 2007 Enamel, screen print, tar, and spackle on tile over Masonite 96 x 144 inches 243.8 x 365.75 cm

Published by the Morris Museum in association with Waqas Wajahat, New York on the occasion of the exhibition Framing Nature’s Paradox NEIL JENNEY | DONALD SULTAN 1969-2023 October 6, 2023 - February 18, 2024 morrismuseum.org (973) 971-3700 Publication: © 2024 Morris Museum © 2024 W W Books All rights reserved. No part of the contents of this catalog may be reproduced without the written permission of Morris Museum. Artwork: © 2024 Neil Jenney © 2024 Donald Sultan Essay: © 2023 John B. Ravenal Artwork Photography: Argenis Apolinario Marcus Romero Cover: Neil Jenney, NA Vegetae (detail), pages 21-22 Donald Sultan, Japanese Pines April 16 2007 (detail), pages 25-26 Design & Layout: Ronnie Ahlborn Waqas Wajahat Project Coordinator: Sanne Schouten Produced by: W W Books waqaswajahat.com

The Morris Museum—founded in 1913 and located on 8.5 sylvan acres in Morris Township, New Jersey since the mid-1960s—draws visitors from across the region to its dynamic and acclaimed art exhibitions program and performing arts events. Its 45,000+ object collection of art and material culture from around the world join the art of our time in displays throughout the Museum’s purpose-built spaces and within the historic Twin Oaks mansion, designed by McKim, Mead & White.

6 Normandy Heights Road Morristown, NJ morrismuseum.org