Terry Winters: Linking Graphics, Prints, 2000-2010

Image Gallery

January 26 - March 7, 2010

Terry Winters is a world-renowned painter and printmaker whose work investigates biological, artificial, and information-based structures in a uniquely rigorous and imaginative manner. Winters explores the world's dynamic energies through intricately fluid geometries. His prints and paintings speak to the history of abstract art, and explore the pulsating biological and spiritual dimensions of human existence. For the last four decades, Terry Winters has created interrelated bodies of prints and paintings that are completely unique in the history of American art. Terry Winters' prints are exhibited at the Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery through an academic collaboration with the Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine.

Wednesday, February 24 at 7:00 pm, Artist Lecture in Vollum Lecture Hall
Followed by a reception at the Cooley Gallery. Free and open to the public.

On view Tuesday, January 26—Sunday, March 7 at the Cooley Gallery
Open every week, Tuesday through Sunday, from 12:00—5:00 pm. 

Born in Brooklyn, NY, in 1949, Terry Winters had his first solo exhibition in New York, in 1982, at the Sonnabend Gallery; subsequently, he was included in the Whitney Biennials of 1985, 1987 and 1995. Additionally, he held a one-person show at the Tate Gallery in London; his work has been exhibited at the Corcoran Gallery of Art as well as with many international museums and galleries. Winters' master prints are held in the collections of major American and European museums including: the Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco. 

Terry Winters attended the High School of Art & Design in New York and continued formal art training at the Pratt Institute, receiving a BFA in 1971. His early paintings are influenced by minimalist, monochromatic paintings, like those of Brice Marden. Winters has a love of drawing which led him to introduce schematic references to astronomical, biological and architectural structures as the subject matter of his paintings. He began exhibiting his work in 1977, and by the early 1980s his ideas had developed into loose grids of organic shapes beside lushly painted fields. Bill Goldston invited Winters to print at the Universal Limited Art Editions studio in 1982. Winters' work at ULAE has become increasingly complex, combining elements of drawing with painting. The artist lives and works in New York and Geneva, Switzerland.

The Colby College Museum of Art holds the complete print oeuvre of Terry Winters, an artist whose complex and masterful prints are integrally linked to his paintings and drawings. Winters began making prints with Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE) in 1983, and since this first group of lithographs, the Morula series (1983-84), he has created etchings, screenprints, linoleum cuts, and woodcuts. Winters' imagery is equally expansive. Frequently organized in serial groupings, his prints display free-floating cellular structures or clusters of spirals, knots, grids, and veined networks. Occasionally he incorporates texts or numbers into his works, as in his Tokyo Notes series (2005). He has also used printmaking to initiate collaborations, working with the literary critic Jean Starobinski on Perfection, Way, Origin (2001), and the novelist Ben Marcus on Turbulence Skins (2004). Numbering more than 200 works, the Winters Print Collection came to the Colby Museum of Art in 2002 as a partial gift from the artist and ULAE, with the remaining support drawn from the Museum's Jere Abbott Acquisitions Fund. Winters and ULAE have given subsequent works to Colby, and the artist's ongoing generosity will allow the Museum to continue to represent his print publications in their entirety.

ORGANIZED FOR THE DOUGLAS F. COOLEY MEMORIAL ART GALLERY BY STEPHANIE SNYDER, DIRECTOR AND CURATOR, THE REED COLLEGE ART DEPARTMENT, AND THE COLBY COLLEGE MUSEUM OF ART, WATERVILLE, MAINE.

TERRY WINTERS COMES TO REED COLLEGE AS A STEPHEN E. OSTROW DISTINGUISHED VISITOR IN THE ARTS. THE OSTROW PROGRAM WAS ESTABLISHED IN 1988, BY LONGTIME FRIENDS OF THE COLLEGE EDWARD AND SUE COOLEY AND JOHN AND BETTY GRAY, IN SUPPORT OF ART HISTORY AND ITS PLACE IN THE HUMANITIES.

THE MISSION OF THE PROGRAM IS TO BRING TO REED CREATIVE INDIVIDUALS WHO ARE DISTINGUISHED IN CONNECTION WITH THE VISUAL ARTS AND WHO WILL PROVIDE A FORUM FOR CONCEPTUAL EXPLORATION, CHALLENGE, AND DISCOVERY.

TERRY WINTERS' VISIT HAS BEEN ORGANIZED BY PROFESSOR OF ART MICHAEL KNUTSON, REED COLLEGE.