ART CITIES:Los Angeles-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.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Matthew Marks Gallery Archive
Terry Winters in his solo exhibition ”Works and Days” presents new paintings on paper made in the past year. Winters’s work reflects an expansive vision for the potential of abstract painting by incorporating contemporary concepts of the natural world. His range of themes includes mathematical diagrams, musical notation, the architecture of living systems, and new orders of data visualization. Winters’s continuous experimentation with different subject matter and materials yields paintings of remarkable richness and brilliance. The new paintings on paper each fill a large sheet from edge to edge. The flatness of their support transmits both the immediacy of the artist’s markings and the imaginary spaces of their content; the works remain enigmatic in their beauty and full of associative meaning. The artist has said: “I want the painting process to be direct and diagrammatic—straightforward and factual gestures that open a wide imaginative territory. It has something to do with animation and some desire to construct images as necessary fictions with an emotional life”.
For four decades, Terry Winters’s paintings have mapped natural biological processes through abstract forms, lines, and color. Winters considers science to be “a neutral, and neutralizing, structure: a kind of blank metaphor which can be loaded with all the poetry occurring on the pictorial film of the painting”. His first excursions into organic shapes came by sketching botanical spores, pods, and stamens from natural history museums and books. These drawings became a catalyst for the subject matter of his paintings, in which organic tubes, cavities, and cavernous holes stretch over large expansive canvases. In 2000, Winters worked with Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas to create and install a series of sixty paintings, known as Set Diagrams, at the Lehmann Maupin Gallery in New York. The collaboration with Koolhaas allowed the architectural structure within Winters’s paintings to extend into the physical environment of the gallery. Winters describes Set Diagrams as a “hysterical investigation” of nature, believing biological processes to be inherently erratic. “I’m trying to make a diagrammatic abstraction that allows for coordinates to be established within which an investigation takes place” Winters commented, “but the investigation is necessarily kind of hysterical because the process is unpredictable”. Winters’s coordinates are plotted through spheres, charts, and graphs, reminiscent of data arranged in physics or biology textbooks. The points dissolve underneath chaotic lines and arrows, evoking abstract interpretations of blueprints, or architectural maps.
Photo: Terry Winters, Stage (Detail), 2020, Oil on paper, 34¾ × 26⅝ in; 88 × 68 cm, © Terry Winters, Courtesy the artist and Matthew Marks Gallery
Info: Matthew Marks Gallery, 7818 Santa Monica Boulevard, Los Angeles, Ca, USA, Duration: 16/10-23/12/2021, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, https://matthewmarks.com
