The Temporary Contemporary
Diverging from the anti-medium, conceptual interests of 1960s and 1970s American art, Terry Winters produces richly expressive, technically advanced, abstract and biomorphic paintings that are primarily interested in gesture, form, and the creative process itself. Scientific aesthetics and ideas underpin these formal experiments: Winters’s triptych Plane of Incidence (1980-81), for example, renders a crystal structure on each of its three panels, each crystal dissolving into a mass of lines to signify the mercurial quality of all natural forms. Terry Winters comprised nearly fifty canvases and fifty works on paper representing the artist’s practice from 1979 on. Though Winters had worked through the 1970s as well, the exhibition focused almost exclusively on his “mature” art, which only developed in the 1980s.
The exhibition was accompanied by a catalogue.
Terry Winters was organized by Lisa Phillips, Curator, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. First staged at MOCA’s Temporary Contemporary, it traveled to the Whitney the following year.
The Temporary Contemporary is the original name of The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA.