“The Drawing Center presents an overview of Terry Winters’s drawings from 1980 to the present, the first such exhibition in the United States. It will include a selection of large-scale works on paper and a wide span of smaller drawings as well as a suite of rarely seen drawings created between 2006 and 2016 in vitrines. Unlike typical retrospectives, this presentation is organized with an eye to morphological relationships so that, as viewers move through the gallery, they will recall and ideally return to earlier related images. The show foregrounds the overarching theme of Winters’s practice: the impulse to make sense, however fictively, of the manner in which the visible world is constructed and received.

A leading figure in the art world for four decades, Terry Winters became well-known in the 1980s for his materially-conscious drawings and paintings. Mobilizing the patterns and schema that undergird physical and intellectual life, Winters has developed his own pictorial language wherein, for example, graphs, networks, and knots describe complex encounters between biological drives, technological systems, and mental processes. Winters’s mature work is ostensibly abstract in that it does not typically depict recognizable objects or scenes, and yet, it is in no way divorced from the real world. On the contrary, Winters incorporates and modifies found images—often seemingly objective data from scientific renderings—in order to reveal the way in which these motifs are framed and affected by human intention. As Winters observes: ‘Although technical images are the product of human activity, these images also seem free from subjective decision-making. … I use this found imagery as a model, to see how information can be torqued or tweaked, made more poetic and expressive’.” — The Drawing Center

Terry Winters, Schema (57), 1985–86. Graphite and watercolor on paper, 12 x 8 1/2 inches. Private collection.

Terry Winters, Linking Graphics, 2, 1999. Ink, graphite, and color pencil on paper, 30 1/2 x 44 1/4 inches. Collection of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, purchase. Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.

Terry Winters, Untitled (2), 1999. Gouache on paper, 44 1/4 x 30 1/2 inches. Private collection.

Terry Winters, 7-Fold Sequence, Two, 2008. Graphite on paper, 22 1/8 x 30 inches. Collection of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Virginia Herrick Deknatel Purchase Fund and museum purchase with funds donated by Davis and Carol Noble.

Terry Winters, Untitled (Page), 2011. Graphite on paper, 11 x 8 1/2 inches.

Terry Winters, Untitled, 2011. Graphite and gouache on paper, 22 1/4 x 30 inches.

Terry Winters: Facts and Fictions was organized by Claire Gilman, Chief Curator.

Images courtesy The Drawing Center.