Untitled from Graphic Primitives

A native New Yorker, Terry Winters ranks among the most dedicated contemporary printmakers. Although his work is rooted in abstraction, it is informed by an interest in the structure of biological, architectural, and technological forms. His early work, influenced by natural-history illustrations and medical diagrams, included masses of fertilized and dividing cells and neural connections, while more recent images center around loosely structured grids inspired by microchips, circuitry, and transit maps.

Winters believes that painting, drawing, and printmaking play equally important and integral roles in his creative practice, and he often explores themes and ideas across all mediums in his work. Shortly before his first solo exhibition in 1982, he was invited to Universal Limited Art Editions to make his first prints. This initial experiment with lithography developed into a long and fruitful relationship with the workshop and its printers, who have collaborated with Winters on many of his one hundred fifty prints to date. The vast majority of these prints appear in portfolios, a format which is well suited to his interest in systems and structures. His early Folio of 1985, which demonstrates an interest in biological and cellular forms, is constituted to exploit this sequential potential, and his prints up to the present day do so as well.

As Winters has grown more involved with printmaking, he has expanded his practice to include intaglio, screenprint, linoleum cut, and woodcut. Additionally, he has experimented with new ways of using traditional print mediums. In Graphic Primitives, which demonstrates his interest in technology and cyberspace, Winters digitally manipulated drawings he had scanned into a computer before having them laser-cut into woodblocks. The blocks were then printed using a process pioneered by Pablo Picasso in which the blocks are printed in white ink before the sheet is rinsed in black ink.

Credit: John B. Turner Fund