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Across four decades of his work, Terry Winters has been examining, in various iterations, the relationships between modernist abstraction, information systems, and the architecture of the natural world. While predominantly a painter – his chosen media tending to be oil, wax, and resin on linen - Winters is also known for his drawing and printmaking. Each of these different media further his overall project where mark making is seen as a pictorial process, and where each medium is used to reveal new subjects and possible meanings. As Winters has said: “I’m trying to engineer the paintings to the point where there is a likeness, a sense of life – that the abstract images are somehow real”. In much of his recent work, Winters returns to a series of gridded forms and organic motifs denoting the idea of scale-free networks, both cosmic and molecular. The disorienting scalar associations have persisted since the beginning of his work, testifying to Winters’ enduring interest in the imaging of patterns and systems that undergird the natural world, describing a dynamic landscape of shifting dimensions and locations. While the organisation of forms on the canvas have tended – however loosely – to derive from a gridded structure, their configurations invent new spatial perspectives, appearing to bulge, bend and warp. And although the straightforward nature of his titles tend to connote something prosaic, Winters’ paintings are anything but. With their complex colours, experimental forms, and spirited application of paint, Winters’ works contain unbounded sets of possibilities: calculated and spontaneous, restrained and emotional – both technically determined and lyrically improvised.
Terry Winters was born in 1949 in Brooklyn, NY. He lives and works in New York City and Columbia County, NY. His work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions at museums across the United States and Europe, including the Drawing Center, NY, USA (2018); University Museum of Contemporary Art, University of Massachusetts Amherst, MA, USA (2018); Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, USA (2017); Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark (2014); Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland (2009); The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY, USA (2001); Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland (2000); Whitechapel Gallery, London (1999); Victoria and Albert Museum, London (1998); Whitney Museum of American Art, NY, USA (1992); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA, USA (1991); Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN, USA (1987) Tate Gallery London (1986).
Born in New York, NY, USA, 1949 Lives and works in New York, NY, USA
Anderson Collection at Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA Brooklyn Museum, New York, NY, USA The Broad, Los Angeles, CA, USA Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH, USA Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, ME, USA Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX, USA Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO, USA Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, MI, USA Harvard University Art Museums, Cambridge, MA, USA The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA, USA Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland The Jewish Museum, New York, NY, USA Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, USA Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, MN, USA Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA, USA Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA, USA Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX, USA Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, USA National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., USA National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA, USA Rose Art Museum, Waltham, MA, USA San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, USA Tate, London Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN, USA Whitney Museum of American Art, NY, USA