Donald Sultan’s suite of prints “The Brutal, Unsentimental Landscape” is a pessimistic look at the human condition. Working at the intersection of abstraction and realism, Sultan produced a series of images that are ostensibly landscapes, but are actually personal reflections on war, violence, environmental degradation, and the impermanence of human endeavor. “Man is inherently self-destructive, and whatever is built will be destroyed, ” he once said in commenting on the nihilism present in some of his work. Paradoxically, the intaglio prints possess an aesthetic appeal that belies their grim content; Sultan leaves this contradiction unaddressed.
