Wednesday Artist: Terry Winters

. . . Painting is a combination of carpentry and catastrophe. . . 

That instability allows for significant or surprising things

to happen, or at least the possibility.

~ Terry Winters*

Internationally known, American artist Terry Winters is a painter, printmaker, and draughtsman who frequently addresses via abstract and representational series his interests in information systems, scientific processes such as biological and living systems, and mathematical theories. Currently, he is displaying approximately 50 works on paper, dating from 1982 to 2014, in "Terry Winters: The Structure of Things", at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts; the show is on view through June 18. (Read a review of the exhibition at The Arts Fuse.)

One of Winters's recent projects, well worth exploring, is the Web-based Graz Cabinet, comprising 327 links and images on Pinterest. The links, Winters explains on his Website, map a series of connections between the natural history collections of the Universalmuseum Joanneum and Winters's own paintings and graphics. For display in "The Painters' Cabinet: Terry Winters's Dialogue with Nature", an exhibition at Kunsthaus Graz last year (March 11 - August 21, 2016), Winters made large digital prints (each of the seven panels was 142" x 47") of the Pinterest project. Documented in an illustrated exhibition catalogue that includes a Kenneth Goldsmith essay, "Raiding the Digital Icebox: Meditations Around Terry Winters's Graz Cabinet" (listen to the exhibition's audioguide at Soundcloud), the project is a fascinating mix of art and science, the virtual and the organic, that underscores interconnections among various fields of knowledge while also challenging our traditional notions of production, consumption, and preservation.

A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 2013, Winters exhibits throughout the world. He lives and works in New York City and Columbia County, New York.

Following is a video with Winters, Unintended Things to Happen, in which the artist talks about his "painterly approach" to printmaking and drawing and other aspects of his work. (Anders Kold interviewed Winters in Denmark in August 2015.)

Terry Winters Website

Terry Winters at Gemini G.E.L., Matthew Marks Gallery, Pace Prints, Saatchi Gallery, and Universal Limited Editions

Terry Winters Print Collection at Colby College Museum of Art

Terry Winters on Vimeo

* Quoted from Jennifer Samet, "Beer with a Painter: Terry Winters", Hyperallergic, February 7, 2015