Terry Winters, Phase Portrait 6, 2006

Terry Winters (b. 1949, New York, NY, United States) earned his B.F.A. from the Pratt Institute in 1971, where his early interest in Minimalism and its exploration of painting conventions shaped his artistic development. While engaging with the non-narrative abstraction of Modernism, Winters began to push against the reductive tendencies of the era's dominant Formalist abstraction. For the first decade after graduating, he worked quietly and privately, observed by a small circle of artists, including Jasper Johns. During this period, he delved into Process Art and studied historical texts on pigments, which sparked his interest in making his own pigments and exploring the scientific realms of biology, mineralogy, and information systems for their metaphorical potential.

A pivotal moment in Winters' career came in 1977 when he assisted in constructing Walter de Maria’s earthwork, Lightning Field, in New Mexico, which deepened his engagement with landscape and natural forms. By the late 1970s, he was using pigments to explore the referential and illusionistic qualities of painting—how mark-making and process can create spatial dimensions beyond representation. This exploration culminated in his first exhibition in 1982 at Sonnabend Gallery, where his unique approach to painting—using gestures and modular forms to create complex paths and layered grounds—was showcased.

Since then, Winters has exhibited extensively, becoming part of a movement of artists such as Tony Cragg, Bill Jensen, and Stephen Mueller, who engage with organic abstraction and visual thinking shaped by evolving technology. His work from the 1990s onward has evolved in scale and complexity, incorporating influences from the natural sciences and information systems into compositions that transition from occupied fields to intricate grids and networks. His paintings maintain an ambiguous familiarity while reflecting the dynamic process of their creation. Winters’ work has been featured in 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.

Terry Winters United States, b. 1949

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Terry Winters United States, b. 1949

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