Terry Winters

This exhibition is the first retrospective of the work of Terry Winters to be presented in Europe, featuring over fifty works from the last fifteen years and including a spectacular series of recent drawings that have not been shown before. The accompanying catalogue reproduces all the works exhibited and includes texts by the curator of the exhibition, Enrique Juncosa, and the artist Ronald Jones. Terry Winters (New York 1949) became known in 1982 through an exhibition at the Sonnabend Gallery in his native city. Since then his work has evolved until he has become one of the most prestigious and original abstract painters on the current New York scene. In 1991 the Whitney Museum in New York organised a major retrospective of his work, which subsequently travelled to the MOCA in Los Angeles. Terry Winters’ work of the eighties is full of organic images suggesting seeds, spores, fungi, cell structures, shells, insects, DNA sequences, honeycombs or mineral crystals. These forms floating on a viscous pictorial background as if emerging from matter become metaphors of transformation and evolution while also referring to social structures. Gradually ambiguous shapes appear in the paintings, protuberances and cavities that suggest mechanisms of sexual reproduction. With these forms, which also draw inspiration from non-art sources such as Taoist magic calligraphy or cabbalistic diagrams, Winters creates suggestive totemic structures that seek to arouse the associative potential in the viewer’s imagination. In the nineties Winters’ work progressively embraces abstraction, showing an interest in developments in computer science, fractal theory and virtual reality. At first sight these works suggest liquid landscapes that refer to a world within us and also to stellar space. Gradually, however, the images lose all specific visual references and become hypothetical representations of physical concepts such as order, chaos, gravity or velocity. Winters superimposes different meshes of coloured lines that finally create a contradictory image of static dynamism. These vibrant images, resulting from thoughts triggered off as he is painting, seem to lie on the threshold of representation, requiring a viewer to complete them. They also suggest outlines and centres, as if emphasising a metaphorical intention: these are images that welcome us.