American painter. He studied at the Pratt Institute, New York, where he was awarded his BFA in 1971. Often grouped with Post-modern abstractions, he retained a strong modernist sensibility. Although his first works were tonally restricted monochromes, Winters was always interested in the context surrounding the nature of painting: he conducted research into the origin of pigments and made botanical studies. His first mature works were those that addressed botanical subjects. An early example is Fungus (1982; London, Saatchi Gal.), in which the plants are painted as if they were elements of a loose chart or index. Rather than being a topographical study, the forms are rendered in a simple, almost crude manner, reminiscent of the late paintings of Philip Guston. Combining a hierarchy of forms with a concern for mark-making, Winters created a fusion of painterly tradition with a Post-modern practice of repetition and figuration.
In later paintings Winters drew on a range of sources such as architectural renderings, medical photographs and computer graphics, and to fold and layer the subject-matter in such a complex manner that the picture conveyed an abstract imaginary space. In pictures such as Parallel Rendering 2 (1996; London, Tate), Winters developed a painterly language of dense webs and folds that use hidden systems to form a suggested core or interior space.
Francis Summers
From Grove Art Online
© 2009 Oxford University Press