ART CITIES:N.York-Terry Winters
Over the last four decades, Terry Winters has expanded the concerns of abstract painting by engaging contemporary concepts of the natural world. Many of his earliest paintings depict organic forms reminiscent of botanical imagery. Over time, his range of themes expanded to include the architecture of living systems, mathematical diagrams, musical notation, and new orders of data visualization. His brilliant palette reflects his continual experimentation with materials.
By Efi MIchalarou
Photo: Matthew Marks Gallery Archive
Throughout Terry Winters’ paintings and works on paper a metaphoric sensibility reveals itself in the expressive language of resonant forms and figures. The exhibition “Table of Contents” includes nine paintings on linen, five paintings on paper, and a set of 26 drawings by the artist. All are being exhibited for the first time. Winters’s work returns us to the life of abstraction on molecular, cosmic, and compositional levels. His materials inform his images, often in surprisingly direct fashion. The paintings on linen, most measuring 213.4 cm tall by 152.4 cm wide, are made with oil, wax, and resin. With careful attention to the attributes of his pigments, Winters achieves a color palette of exceptional depth and vibrancy. The paintings on paper, each filling a large sheet from edge to edge, are created through a parallel process, and the flatness of their support transmits both the immediacy of his markings and the imaginary spaces of their content. Drawing has long been a central component of Winters’s art. On view here is “Table of Contents” (2020), a series of twenty-six works in graphite, ink, and wax. Executed on tab dividers designed for three-ring binders, these drawings depict a range of structures and patterns, and vividly demonstrate the medium’s generative role in his practice. A prodigious painter, draftsman, and printmaker, Terry Winters has pushed the boundaries of modern art while he has maintained a keen sense of its history and craft. Born in Brooklyn in 1949, he received a BFA in 1971 from the Pratt Institute in New York. Although he first painted in a reductive style influenced by minimalism and process art, by the end of the 1970s Winters had given up the attempt to keep figuration from his compositions. After a period of developing his work in private, he had his first solo exhibition at Sonnabend Gallery in 1982, with exhibitions following at major European and American Museums. Through the 1980s, he explored such natural processes as crystal formation, fungal growth, and cellular division, typically rendered in a lush painterly manner. Since the 1990s, he has pursued imagery related to information and technology, drawing from such sources as architectural renderings, medical photographs, and computer graphics, but always transforming them into new symbolic configurations. At times collaborating with writers, dancers, and architects, he has enlisted the “low-tech, shape-shifting capabilities” of paint, as he puts it, to engage the complex experience of a high-tech world.
Photo: Terry Winters, Terry Winters, Untitled (Detail), 2018, Oil, wax, and resin on linen, 77 × 59 inches / 196 × 150 cm, © Terry Winters, Courtesy the artist and Matthew Marks,Gallery
Info: Matthew Marks,Gallery, 522 West 22nd Street, New York, USA, Duration: 14/5-26/6/2021, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 12:00-18:00, by appointment (book here), https://matthewmarks.com
