Terry Winters
Encyclopedia
Painting
Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a surface . The application of the medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush but other objects can be used. In art, the term painting describes both the act and the result of the action. However, painting is...
whose work reintroduced figuration into painting in way that was consonant with the Modernist legacy. Klaus Kertess wrote that “in the mid 1970s, Terry Winters and such peers as Carroll Dunham, Bill Jensen, and Stephen Mueller began to feel increasingly constricted by painting’s and drawing’s phenomenological order and orders. How to reintegrate more variegated mark making and spatiality, how to give body not just to process but to metaphor, without sacrificing the hard-won physicality and non-narrative abstractness
Abstract art
Abstract art uses a visual language of form, color and line to create a composition which may exist with a degree of independence from visual references in the world. Western art had been, from the Renaissance up to the middle of the 19th century, underpinned by the logic of perspective and an...
so crucial to late Modernism
Modernism
Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes the modernist movement, its set of cultural tendencies and array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society...
—all of these became overriding concerns.” His work has been the subject of numerous exhibitions, including two retrospectives at the Whitney Museum, and is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art
Museum of Modern Art
The Museum of Modern Art is an art museum in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, on 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It has been important in developing and collecting modernist art, and is often identified as the most influential museum of modern art in the world...
, New York, and the Walker Art Center
Walker Art Center
The Walker Art Center is a contemporary art center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States. The Walker is considered one of the nation's "big five" museums for modern art along with the Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum and the Hirshhorn...
, Minneapolis. He is represented by the Matthew Marks Gallery
Matthew Marks Gallery
Matthew Marks is an art gallery located in the New York City neighborhood of Chelsea. Founded in the early 1990s by Matthew Marks, it specializes in modern and contemporary art in a variety of media: including painting, sculpture, photography, installation art, film, and drawings and prints...
in New York
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
.
Work
After graduating from the Pratt InstitutePratt Institute
Pratt Institute is a private art college in New York City located in Brooklyn, New York, with satellite campuses in Manhattan and Utica. Pratt is one of the leading undergraduate art schools in the United States and offers programs in Architecture, Graphic Design, History of Art and Design,...
in 1971, he painted for ten years, not once exhibiting his work. It was only in 1982 that he had his first solo exhibition at the Sonnabend Gallery, showing his work as a fully mature artist.
While the sources of Winters’ subject matter can be traced to the natural science
Natural science
The natural sciences are branches of science that seek to elucidate the rules that govern the natural world by using empirical and scientific methods...
s, architecture
Architecture
Architecture is both the process and product of planning, designing and construction. Architectural works, in the material form of buildings, are often perceived as cultural and political symbols and as works of art...
, and more recently, information systems and computer graphics
Computer graphics
Computer graphics are graphics created using computers and, more generally, the representation and manipulation of image data by a computer with help from specialized software and hardware....
, what his actual canvases depict remains obscure yet rational, mysterious yet palpable. His paintings from the 1980s have their antecedents in the work of Arshile Gorky
Arshile Gorky
Arshile Gorky was an Armenian-born American painter who had a seminal influence on Abstract Expressionism. As such, his works were often speculated to have been informed by the suffering and loss he experienced of the Armenian genocide.-Early life:...
and the early biomorphic
Biomorphism
Biomorphism is an art movement that began in the 20th century. It patterns artistic design elements on naturally occurring patterns or shapes reminiscent of nature. Taken to its extreme it attempts to force naturally occurring shapes onto functional devices, often with mixed results.-History:The...
pictures of Mark Rothko
Mark Rothko
Mark Rothko, born Marcus Rothkowitz , was a Russian-born American painter. He is classified as an abstract expressionist, although he himself rejected this label, and even resisted classification as an "abstract painter".- Childhood :Mark Rothko was born in Dvinsk, Vitebsk Province, Russian...
and Barnett Newman
Barnett Newman
Barnett Newman was an American artist. He is seen as one of the major figures in abstract expressionism and one of the foremost of the color field painters.-Early life:...
. And the scarred, fuliginous, tactile grounds out of which the primordial organisms and personages of Dumb Compass (1985) emerge find their inspiration in the monochrome canvases of Brice Marden
Brice Marden
Brice Marden , is an American artist, generally described as Minimalist, although his work defies specific categorization. He lives in New York and Eagles Mere.Marden is represented by the Matthew Marks Gallery.-Life:...
, one the artist’s greatest influences. Lisa Phillips wrote that Winters’ biomorphic paintings “eschewed the hyperbole of much so-called Neo-expressionism
Neo-expressionism
Neo-expressionism is a style of modern painting and sculpture that emerged in the late 1970s and dominated the art market until the mid-1980s...
and the cool mechanical approach of favored by the Neo-Conceptualists. He is something of an anomaly.”
By the mid-nineties, Winters’ work would assume an altogether different tenor. Grids and tesselated
Tessellation
A tessellation or tiling of the plane is a pattern of plane figures that fills the plane with no overlaps and no gaps. One may also speak of tessellations of parts of the plane or of other surfaces. Generalizations to higher dimensions are also possible. Tessellations frequently appeared in the art...
patterns of colored shapes began to enter into his paintings. There was also a gradual transition from the landscape
Landscape
Landscape comprises the visible features of an area of land, including the physical elements of landforms such as mountains, hills, water bodies such as rivers, lakes, ponds and the sea, living elements of land cover including indigenous vegetation, human elements including different forms of...
or figures in or on a field format in the organic paintings to the all-over composition of works like ‘’Color and Information’’ (1998); its layered, churning grids of color conflate the slow deliberate process of painting with the torrent of pixels that make up so much of the imagery in the digital age.
Winters is also a highly regarded draftsman
Drawing
Drawing is a form of visual art that makes use of any number of drawing instruments to mark a two-dimensional medium. Common instruments include graphite pencils, pen and ink, inked brushes, wax color pencils, crayons, charcoal, chalk, pastels, markers, styluses, and various metals .An artist who...
and printmaker, which have been the subjects of their own exhibitions. For a symposium at the Drawing Center
Drawing Center
The Drawing Center is a SoHo museum and the only nonprofit exhibition space in the United States to focus solely on the exhibition of drawings, both historical and contemporary.- Location and activities :...
in New York, Winters issued a statement concerning the significance of drawing to him: “Drawing is central to my work—everything moves out, in all directions, from drawing…Drawing is a prototype—the first time an image is seen. My approach is diagrammatic—each image becomes a superimposition of maps. Objects and information are transcribed as events; pieces of existing data are re-assembled into new patterns…Formed by impulses, drawing is used as an operative abstraction for the construction of pictures.”
Books
- Winters, Terry. Ocular Proofs. New York: Dome Editions, 1995.
- Winters, Terry. Terry Winters: Computation of Chains. New York: Matthew Marks Gallery, 1997.
- Winters, Terry. Graphic Primitives. New York: Matthew Marks Gallery, 1999.
- Winters, Terry. Terry Winters: Drawings. New York: Matthew Marks Gallery, 2001.
- Winters, Terry. Terry Winters: Drawings. Munich: Staatliche Graphische Sammlung München, 2004.
- Winters, Terry. Terry Winters: 1981–1986. New York: Matthew Marks Gallery, 2004.
- Winters, Terry. Terry Winters: Prints & Sequences. Waterville, Maine: Colby College Museum of Art, 2006.
- Winters, Terry. Filters in Stock. New York: 38th Street Publishers, 2009.
Further reading
Articles- ArtforumArtforumArtforum is an international monthly magazine specializing in contemporary art.-Publication:The magazine is published ten times a year, September through May, along with an annual summer issue...
(February 1998), "Terry Winters, Matthew Marks Gallery", pp. 92-93.
*Diehl, Carol. "Thinking, Mapping, Painting," Art in America, April, 2006.
- Kastner, Jeffrey. An Energetic Imagist Who Dances with Chance. New York Times, Sunday, August 19, 2001.
- Muchnic, Suzanne. Winters’ Show Is an Earthly Experience. Los Angeles TimesLos Angeles TimesThe Los Angeles Times is a daily newspaper published in Los Angeles, California, since 1881. It was the second-largest metropolitan newspaper in circulation in the United States in 2008 and the fourth most widely distributed newspaper in the country....
, Tuesday, February 9, 1988, part VI. - Schjeldahl, Peter. The Redeemer. Time Out New York, October 28, 1997.
Books
- Phillips, Lisa. Terry Winters. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1991.
- Weinberg, Adam. Terry Winters: Paintings, Drawings, Prints, 1994-2004. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004.