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Terry Winters is considered one of the modern masters of the drawing
medium. His works are simultaneously influenced by the legacy of
abstract-expressionism—notably Gorky and Pollock—and surrealism,
as well as his interest in microscopic organic forms.
His palette is usually muted, using subtle variations of black,
grey, and brown. Winters is also a prolific and innovative printmaker.
His paintings, drawings, and prints have been shown in major exhibitions
worldwide, and are in most major museum collection of contemporary
art.
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CRITICAL EXCERPTS
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Stephen Ellis, Art in America, 9/88
"For Terry Winters, even more than for most painters, drawing is
the soil out of which his thinking has grown. Although his fluency
as a draftsman is widely recognized, that same fluency has sometimes
obscured the nature of his originality...Winters had long been interested
in the architecture of natural forms, and had, simply for pleasure,
amassed a collection of texts illustrating them. Using these illustrations
as a point of departure though not as a literal source, Winters
creates his own lexicon of structures—what Klaus Kertess has called
his personal "morphology." This lexicon is constructed from things
that are relatively 'new' in the sense of our awareness and structural
understanding of them: vascular systems, microscopic plant and animal
cells, mineral crystals and the molecular building blocks of nature
like DNA strands...Winters' introduction of this new world of forms
into painting and his adaptation of the elaborate descriptive language
of classical Western painting to render it has the simplicity—the
retrospective obviousness—of a really good idea....If Winters desire
to draw forms (rather than to catalogue definitions of the medium)
led him to his subject matter, it is the virtuosity of his drawing
that allows him to bring these subjects to vivid life. That virtuosity
doesn't depend solely on his skill in creating luxurious, seductive
surfaces, though he can do that effortlessly; its essence is his
acute sense of physical structure—his capacity for imaginatively
inhabiting his chosen forms...Drawing is to painting as thought
is to speech: there's no inherent demand for it to aspire to more
elaborate rhetoric than the moment requires."
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