Terry Winters (born 1949, Brooklyn, NY) is an American painter, draughtsman, and printmaker whose nuanced approach to the process of painting has addressed evolving concepts of spatiality and expanded the concerns of abstract art. His attention to the process of painting and investigations into systems and spatial fields explores both non-narrative abstraction and the physicality of

modernism Modernism is both a philosophy, philosophical and arts movement that arose from broad transformations in Western world, Western society during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The movement reflected a desire for the creation of new fo ...

. In Winters’ work, abstract processes give way to forms with real word agency that recall mathematical concepts and

cybernetics Cybernetics is a wide-ranging field concerned with circular causality, such as feedback, in regulatory and purposive systems. Cybernetics is named after an example of circular causal feedback, that of steering a ship, where the helmsperson m ...

, as well as natural and scientific worlds.

Life and work

Originally from Brooklyn, NY, Terry Winters studied at the

Pratt Institute Pratt Institute is a private university with its main campus in Brooklyn, New York (state), New York. It has a satellite campus in Manhattan and an extension campus in Utica, New York at the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute. The school was ...

where he earned his B.F.A. in 1971. Interested in

Minimalism In visual arts, music and other media, minimalism is an art movement that began in post–World War II in Western art, most strongly with American visual arts in the 1960s and early 1970s. Prominent artists associated with minimalism include Don ...

and its exploration of painting’s conventions, Winters began to think against the reductive tendencies of the then dominant Formalist abstraction while maintaining hard-won modernist sensibility of non-narrative abstraction.Kimmelman, Michael. "Art View; Cells, Crystals, Bugs, and Shells, Rendered in Paint." ''New York Times'', 8 March 1992. For ten years following his graduation from the Pratt Institute Winters worked quietly and deliberately, not showing his work publicly and watched quietly by a small group of fellow artists, including Jasper Johns. During this time, Winters explored his interest in Process Art, collecting books on pigments such as

Pliny the Elder Gaius Plinius Secundus (AD 23/2479), called Pliny the Elder (), was a Roman author, naturalist and natural philosopher, and naval and army commander of the early Roman Empire, and a friend of the emperor Vespasian. He wrote the encyclopedic '' ...

’s ''Natural History''. These studies, combined with his interest in building paintings ″from the ground up″, led him to explore making his own pigments, introducing him to the study of biology and mineralogy (and eventually to empirical information systems) and these fields’ associative and metaphoric potential.Phillips, Lisa. ″The Self Similar.″ In ''Terry Winters. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art'', 1992. In 1977, Winters had a significant encounter with landscape while he lived in New Mexico to help construct the earthwork ''Lightning Field'' by

Walter de Maria Walter Joseph De MariaRoberta Smith (July 26, 2013)Walter De Maria, Artist on Grand Scale, Dies at 77 ''New York Times''. (October 1, 1935July 25, 2013) was an American artist, sculptor, illustrator and composer, who lived and worked in New Yor ...

. By the late 1970s, Winters was using pigment to investigate the referential nature of painting. Soon after, his focus shifted to the illusionism inevitable in painting, how mark making and process create illusions that give way to non-representational spatial dimension. This approach is evident in Winters’ first exhibition in 1982 at Sonnabend Gallery. Here, gestures and modules create complex paths and grounds that premiere Winters’ nuanced painting method. Terry Winters has since exhibited widely, joining a group of contemporaries – such as

Tony Cragg Sir Anthony Douglas Cragg (born Liverpool 9 April 1949) is an Anglo-German sculptor, resident in Wuppertal, Germany since 1977. Early life and training Tony Cragg was born in Liverpool."Tony Cragg." ''Contemporary Artists''. Farmington Hills, ...

Bill Jensen Bill Jensen (born 1945) is an American abstract painter. Education Jensen was born in 1945 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He studied at University of Minnesota, where he earned his BFA in 1968 and his MFA in 1970. He has lived and worked in New York ...

, and Stephen Mueller – engaging with organic abstraction and constantly changing thought on visuality impacted by evolving technology. Throughout the 1990s and onward the scale of Winters’ work and its visual complexity has grown considerably. Continuing to take from the natural sciences and information systems, amongst other subject matters, the construction of his compositions has transitioned from occupied fields to plaited grids and networks that offer unpredictable images. Winters reforms his subjects to maintain their resonance and referentiality – what one sees in his compositions is ambiguously familiar – while waxing to an analog for the act of their making.

Exhibitions

The paintings, drawings, and prints of Terry Winters have been the subject of numerous solo and group exhibitions, including major retrospectives at the

Whitney Museum of American Art The Whitney Museum of American Art, known informally as "The Whitney", is an art museum in the Meatpacking District and West Village neighborhoods of Manhattan in New York City. It was founded in 1930 by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (1875–1942), ...

, the

Irish Museum of Modern Art The Irish Museum of Modern Art ( ga, Áras Nua-Ealaíne na hÉireann) also known as IMMA, is Ireland's leading national institution for the collection and presentation of modern and contemporary art. Located in Kilmainham, Dublin, the Museum pr ...

, and the

Metropolitan Museum of Art The Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York City, colloquially "the Met", is the largest art museum in the Americas. Its permanent collection contains over two million works, divided among 17 curatorial departments. The main building at 1000 ...

. Sonnabend Gallery, 1982 The first solo show for Terry Winters, this exhibition established his reputation as an accomplished and distinctive painter and draughtsman. Previously unknown outside of underground circles of artists and collectors, this debut presented his nuanced approach to painting – including his evolving lexicon of biomorphic forms and honed drafting skills – as a welcome tonic for the atmosphere of painting at the time. Whitney Museum of American Art, 1992 This early 1990s survey demonstrates a perceptible evolution in Terry Winters’ work as he frequently shifts from large to small scales and reorients his compositions. The exhibition outlines Winters’ experimentation with printmaking and drawing after 1986 that realized new tonal and mark making potential in his work. Mining graphics and functional analytical tools, diagrams and schema like the architectural grid appear abstracted and occupied by ambiguous forms analogous to the outside world (''Dumb Compass'', 1985). A centerpiece of the exhibition, ''Spine Series'' (1980) simultaneously demonstrates Winters’ interest in the construction of the painting and his investigations into visuality. Later work in the exhibition features complex but singular forms emerging from fields and grounds to take on emotional dimension, evoking consciousness and sensuality (''Tone'', 1989).Shiff, Richard. ″Manual Imagination.″ In ''Terry Winters Paintings, Drawings, Prints 1994 – 2004''. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press in association with Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. 21-22.

Books

*Winters, Terry. ''Filters in Stock''. New York:& Sequences''. Waterville, Maine: Colby College Museum of Art, 2006. *Winters, Terry. ''Terry Winters: 1981–1986''. New York: Matthew Marks Gallery, 2004. *Winters, Terry. ''Terry Winters: Drawings''. Munich: Staatliche Graphische Sammlung München, 2004. *Winters, Terry. ''Terry Winters: Drawings''. New York: Matthew Marks Gallery, 2001. *Winters, Terry. ''Graphic Primitives''. New York: Matthew Marks Gallery, 1999. *Winters, Terry. ''Intersections and Animations''. New York: Dome Editions, 1998. *Winters, Terry. ''Terry Winters: Computation of Chains''. New York: Matthew Marks Gallery, 1997. *Winters, Terry. ''Ocular Proofs''. New York: Dome Editions, 1995.

References

External links

Terry Winters Official Website

Nancy Princenthal interviews Terry Winters for ''Art in America''

Terry Winters at the Matthew Marks Gallery

Terry Winters at Universal Limited Art Editions, Inc.

Terry Winters in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

Terry Winters in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York

Terry Winters exhibition ''Printed Works'' at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
{{DEFAULTSORT:Winters, Terry 20th-century American painters American male painters 21st-century American painters Artists from New York (state) 1949 births Living people American draughtsmen Pratt Institute alumni 20th-century American printmakers 20th-century American male artists Members of the American Academy of Arts and Letters

Life and work

Exhibitions

Books

References

Further reading

External links