Terry Winters: Knotted Graphs

New York-based artist Terry Winters is known for paintings, drawings and prints that oscillate between figuration and abstraction. Rooted in Minimalism, Winters' work reflects his career-long investment in the historical and contemporary stakes of painting, and references ambiguous forms sourced from the sciences, mathematics and architecture. These forms subtly suggest any number of objects--maps, blueprints, seeds, spores, shells, fungi, spiderwebs, X-rays, molecular structures, balls of yarn, fishing nets, tree branches, magnified crystals or neurological circuits--without actually depicting any of them directly, leaving the viewer's eye to wander restlessly throughout the picture plane. Winters has described his strategy: "So much of the contemporary world is driven by abstract processes... The old Modernist oppositions between the retinal and the intellectual just really don't function anymore."
Knotted Graphs presents a series of paintings and drawings made in 2007 and 2008 that further investigate the grid through mathematical principles such as knot theory.