Terry Winters

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. In Winters’ work, abstract processes give way to forms with real word agency that recall mathematical concepts and cybernetics, as well as natural and scientific worlds.

Life and work

Originally from Brooklyn, NY, Terry Winters studied at the Pratt Institute where he earned his B.F.A. in 1971. Interested in Minimalism 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.

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’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.

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.

Terry Winters has since exhibited widely, joining a group of contemporaries – such as Tony Cragg, Bill Jensen, and Stephen Mueller – engaging with organic abstraction and constantly changing thought on visuality impacted by evolving technology. 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 Irish Museum of Modern Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Sonnabend Gallery, 1982

The first solo show for Terry Winters. Previously unknown outside of underground circles of artists and collectors, this debut presented his approach to painting – including his evolving lexicon of biomorphic forms and drafting skills. 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).

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.