Terry Winters
1949–
For the past four decades Terry Winters has delved into organic abstraction in painting, drawing, and printmaking. His earliest canvases, from the mid-1970s— allover compositions filled with thick and clearly recognizable brushstrokes— adhered to the monochrome formats championed by postwar artists. A shift toward quasi-representational imagery occurred in 1980, when his interest in the material qualities of paint led him to depict the crystalline structures of the minerals from which his pigments— many of which he ground himself—were composed. By the early 1980s Winters began incorporating schematically rendered biological imagery into his canvases, evocative of pollen, ova, cells, and other indeterminate organic material.
In Good Government Winters applied paint in thinly layered strokes or heavily impastoed sections, using tools that ranged from traditional brushes to rags to palette knives. The large forms at the top resemble honeycombs and molecular chains, while the smaller black shapes positioned along the bottom conjure plant spores or enlarged chromosomes, signaling the fundamental structures of life. The title alludes to one of Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s fourteenth-century frescoes, Allegory of Good Government, which Winters saw in Siena, Italy, prior to beginning the canvas; but it also refers to his compositional process. Winters recalled how when the painting began to cohere, it reminded him “of those charts you would see in elementary school about good government, where all the different things were all working together.” Despite Winters’s identifiable references and scientific imagery, the painting ultimately remains open to interpretation. “The image has a life of its own,” he has stated; “the image itself is an organism.”
Introduction
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.
Wikidata identifier
Q2405815
Information from Wikipedia, made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License . Accessed May 8, 2025.
Country of birth
United States
Roles
Artist, engraver, painter, photographer
ULAN identifier
500000039
Names
Terry Winters
Information from the Getty Research Institute's Union List of Artist Names ® (ULAN), made available under the ODC Attribution License. Accessed May 8, 2025.
