Sachi Yanari-Rizzo, Curator of Prints & Drawings
Simply titled Fourteen Etchings (1989) by Terry Winters is a favorite work of mine in the FWMoA’s permanent collection. It had been on long term loan for years and was donated to the museum in 2018.
Winters’ career as a painter began to take off when Sonnabend Gallery in New York gave him a solo exhibition in 1982. This was followed by his inclusion in the 1985 Whitney Biennial and group shows at the Tate Gallery and the Museum of Modern Art.
A painter since 1971, Winters initially shared the formal concerns of the Minimalists, like Brice Marden. In 1977, Winters assisted Walter De Maria in his landmark earthwork Lightning Field in New Mexico. By 1982 Winters began pushing the largely nonreferential abstract painting in a new direction. He developed imagery that hovered between abstraction and representation, recalling embryotic cells, sprouting plant pods, and architectural structures. Comparisons of his pieces were made with works by surrealists and early abstract expressionists. Historians have suggested the influence of biologist D’Arcy Thompson, Buckminster Fuller, and Frei Otto.
In the 1980s, drawing and printmaking were becoming important in Winters’ artistic output. A consummate draftsman, he received traditional training through classes at the High School of Art and Design, Parsons School of Design, the Art Students League, and Pratt Institute, where he graduated from in 1971. Drawing became central to his development of new imagery; printmaking allowed the artist to explore aspects of drawing more fully. The FWMoA’s untitled drawing from 1988 seems rooted in scientific illustrations of seed pods and crystalline structures under magnification.
Winters’ earliest foray in printmaking was in 1982. He began making lithographs at Universal Limited Art Editions that year and has been engaged with printmaking ever since, creating 150 prints in intaglio, lithograph, relief, and screenprint.
Primer (1985) resembles the artist’s charcoal drawings. Winters enjoyed the inherent nature of drawing in lithography, with its greasy and powdery qualities. Even though the subject reads like it was printed just in black and white, the lithograph is made up of six colors, in thirteen layers from twelve plates.
The composition is dominated by three centrally placed biomorphic shapes, perhaps resembling germinating seeds. These are reminiscent of forms used in the painting Dystopia from the same year. The background is filled with thin, blue horizontal lines, as if Winters had printed on college-ruled paper. In the lower corner, quick, schematic line drawings, reminiscent of DNA or chromosomes, add to the feeling that this is a notebook sketch. This grouping is used again in his ninth lithograph in Folio (1985-86). Primer retains traces of the drawing process with smudges, struck out images, and seemingly accidental marks.
Winters initially conceived Fourteen Etchings (1989) as illustrations of the poem “Eureka” by Edgar Allan Poe, but the prints evolved as he made new discoveries of source materials. The title page of the portfolio contains a list of constellations that Winters found in the fourth edition of Roget’s International Thesaurus. The artist paired his intaglios with photogravures of x-ray illustrations from a late 19th-century German anatomy book.
He chose close-ups of skeletal parts spanning the length of the body, including the skull, shoulder, rib cage, and joints. The intaglios and x-rays give visual form to what is invisible to the naked eye. The fourteen etching format allowed Winters to explore his ideas more deeply. He explained, “When I work in a series I generally sequence them or think of them as an abstract narrative, a related group of work.”i
In 2018, Winters discussed his use of material from technical/scientific manuals or the internet: “Technical images offer something readymade. That is, found images, technical images, offer us something no one made. Although they are the product of human activity, these images also seem free from subjective decision-making. And the Internet amplifies this; it offers images made by no one and everyone. I use this found imagery as a model, to see how images can be torqued or tweaked, made more poetic. . . That hybrid is something I want for my paintings, using abstraction to make images that are factual and specific and at the same time fictive, almost mythological.”ii
Distinctive to Fourteen Etchings is the artist’s juxtaposition of opposites. On the one hand the skeletal parts and text are mechanically produced. They are found images that are objective and scientific. He contrasts these with hand drawn organic shapes that feel familiar and representational, yet foreign and abstract. They allude to microscopic organisms or macroscopic celestial systems. Constellations are a good example of something that are both factual with their identification of star groupings but also fictional with their connection to mythological stories. Winters’ biomorphic forms are isolated against a neutral background and feel like specimens from illustrated natural history books, which the artist enjoys collecting.
Winters received a thorough introduction to intaglio in Paris with Aldo Crommelynck, who worked as master printer for Pablo Picasso. The intaglio plates for Fourteen Etchings were printed on Torinoko Gampi, a thin, shiny paper, perfect for capturing fine details and nuanced tones. The paper was adhered to the larger Almalfi paper through chine collé.
Make an appointment or stop by the Print & Drawing Study Center, Tuesday-Friday, 11am-3pm to see more of our works on paper!