Jim Sullivan - Places That Never Were

Jim Sullivan

Jim Sullivan (b. 1939) is an American painter and draftsman whose work has pursued the possibilities of landscape, memory, and imagined space for more than six decades. Emerging in New York in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Sullivan developed a highly individual approach to image-making at a moment when the boundaries between abstraction and representation were being actively reconsidered. Across paintings and works on paper, he has returned persistently to the natural world—not as a subject to be observed or recorded, but as material from which to construct places that exist entirely on their own terms.

Sullivan's landscapes are fundamentally invented. Mountains, forests, bodies of water, clouds, geological formations, and atmospheric events recur throughout his work, yet rarely correspond to identifiable locations. Instead, elements drawn from memory, imagination, and occasional visual sources are altered and recombined into environments that hover between the recognizable and the unknown. In…