Terry Winters

Terry Winters is an American artist born in Brooklyn, NY in 1949. He earned his B.F.A. in 1971 from the Pratt Institute where he was interested in Minimalism and its exploration of painting’s conventions. Winters explored his interest in Process Art for ten years after graduation, not showing his work publicly. During this time, he studied pigments and began making his own, which introduced him to the study of biology and mineralogy. In 1977, Winters had a significant encounter with the landscape while he lived in New Mexico to help construct the earthwork Lightning Field by Walter de Maria. By the late 1970s, Winters was using pigment to investigate the referential nature of painting. His focus shifted to the illusionism inevitable in painting, how mark-making and process create illusions that give way to the non-representational spatial dimension. Winters has exhibited widely since his first exhibition in 1982 at Sonnabend Gallery, and his work has grown considerably in scale and visual complexity. He continues to take inspiration from the natural sciences and information systems, and his compositions offer unpredictable images while maintaining their resonance and referentiality.