Terry Winters’s (b. 1949, Brooklyn, New York) art is often seen in relation to 1980s’ Expressionist painting, descending from European Modernism and the New York School. What characterises Winters’ recent paintings is their underlying abstract structure, which is combined with a painterly figuration. In the paintings from the 

 series, Winters’ interest in mathematical visualisation and the development of an abstract and emergent pictorial language is evident. The title refers to the essay “Of Clocks and Clouds” by the philosopher Karl Popper (1902-94). Popper divides phenomena into two categories – those with precise mechanisms (clocks) and those with random or unpredictable behaviours (clouds). Winters is here also inspired by the composer György Ligeti, whose specific shapes of rhythm and harmony often change into diffuse sound textures, and vice versa.

Winters graduated from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn in 1971. His first solo show was at Sonnabend Gallery in 1982. Since then he has had solo exhibitions at, amongst other museums, Tate Gallery in London (1986); The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and Whitney Museum of American Art in New York (1991-92); Victoria and Albert Museum in London and Whitechapel Art Gallery in London (1998); Kunsthalle Basel (2000); The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (2001); Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich (2003) and Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin (2009). Winters lives and works in New York City and in Colombia County, New York.

Terry Winters

Peder Lund is proud to present our second exhibition of paintings by the artist Terry Winters (1949- ). The four paintings on view, 

, were completed between 2015 and 2018. Each picture’s surface is built up in layers of oil, wax, and resin.

Terry Winters investigates, what he has called, a “vitalized geometry” – the patterns and schemas that undergird physical and mental life. His ostensibly abstract work is actually largely grounded in the real world. Incorporating “objective” data culled from technical sources, he reframes and reworks these motifs through the specificity of pictorial intention and with the desire to describe a wider view of nature. A formal vocabulary develops through an intuitive and improvisational process: “I use found imagery as a model, to see how images can be torqued or tweaked, made more poetic and expressive.” The resulting paintings map imaginary and symbolic scenes.

Much like language, Winters’s gestures comprise a series of marks where individual terms find significance within the network in which they are deployed. And also like language, these terms can suggest multiple meanings. Winters’s work demonstrates the impulse to make sense, however fictively, of the manner in which the continually changing visible world is constructed and received.

Terry Winters lives and works in New York City and Columbia County, NY. Winters graduated from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn in 1971. His first solo show was at Sonnabend Gallery in 1982. Since then, his work has been the subject of numerous one-person museum exhibitions in the United States and Europe, including Tate Gallery, London (1986); the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1991); the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1992); the Whitechapel Gallery, London (1998); Kunsthalle Basel (2000); the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2001); the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2009); Kunsthaus Graz, Austria (2016); and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2016). A survey of his drawings, “Terry Winters: Facts and Fictions,” is currently on view in New York at the Drawing Center through August 12.

Works