T
erry Winters’ Tessellation Figures from 2011 explores a wide variety of themes ranging from the architecture of biological and living systems to the new spatial orders of data visualization. The Tessellation Figures series refers to the process of creating a two-dimensional plane through the repetition of a geometric shape. Winters’ kaleidoscopic compositions of overlapping grids and vibrant patterns create complex pictorial spaces that reverberate with a contemporary take on the natural world. Through the use of transparent pigments Winters shares “all the events that went into the making of the painting” as a type of visual transcript of the artist’s working process. Tessellation Figures is imbued with mathematical concepts as well as shapes from the natural and scientific worlds.
Winters, born in 1949, graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Pratt Institute in 1971. He went on to paint alongside artists including Carroll Dunham who were interested in variegated mark making without sacrificing the physicality and non-narrative abstractness that was integral to Modernism. After painting for 10 years without a single exhibition, Ileana Sonnabend presented the artist’s first solo exhibition at her New York gallery in 1982. His work has been shown in exhibitions at international institutions including the Whitney Museum of Art, New York (1992); the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London (1999); the Kunsthalle Basel (2000); the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2001); the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2009); Staatlich Graphische Sammlung at the Pinakothek der Moderne (2014); the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2016); and The Drawing Center, New York (2018).
