TERRY WINTERS 1981-1986
Matthew Marks Gallery
523 West 24 Street
New York NY 10011
212-243-0200
November 6 to December
24, 2004
By STEPHEN
MUELLER
Terry Winters Free
Union 1883
oil on linen, 79 x 104-1/4 inches
Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery
COVER November 21, 2004: Dystopia 1985
oil on linen, 80 x 56 inches
Strangely there are currently
a number of shows around town of 80's art. One of the best is Matthew
Marks show of Terry Winters paintings and drawings from 1981 to 1986.
These are some of the earliest paintings that Winters showed in New
York. The palette is dark and the feeling of the primordial ooze, from
which life springs, is all over the place. Winters was, at the time,
very involved in botanical and other scientific illustrations as source
material.
In the age-old controversy
over the supremacy of drawing or color in painting Winters would definitely
be in the drawing camp. Even the areas of so-called background a draftsman's
hand is evident. Using the scientific illustration as a springboard
Winters improvises, combines, extrapolates and revises forms often to
arrive at a hybrid or even new species. Pine cone, limb, stem and cell
structures sometimes become insect or even human forms. This is not
really the stuff of anthropomorphic grace but rather some weird science
drawn and redrawn out of the forming miasma. The levels of layering
and redrawing become a kind of bildungsroman of the creation myths.
All of the drawings and paintings
in this show were done years before the work Winters showed in a big
exhibition at the Whitney museum in 1991. By that time color had become
of greater importance in the work and form had become clearer. "Point"
in the present show, for instance, is a harbinger of things that followed.
The Whitney show received less than enthusiastic critical response in
some quarters. Daunted but not undone, Winters work began to give form
to binary information systems. The soundtrack started to include European
jazz systems. In short the less lyrical work of the past ten years was
born.
The point of this background
information is to demonstrate that painting is not merely a process
in itself but that the artist is also involved, garnering and responding
to information and to life. The current show at Marks provides a rare
glimpse of some of the beginnings of a beautiful process.
