HOUSTON, TX.- The Contemporary Arts Museum Houston presents Terry Winters/Paintings, Drawings, Prints/1994–2004, the first American exhibition to survey the latest decade of work from this prolific American artist and the first comprehensive look at his work across all media, including his designs for the stage, paintings, prints, drawings, and artists’ books. Winters’ abstract works explore the patterns of nature and their relationships to science and technology. Terry Winters/Paintings, Drawings, Prints/1994–2004 will be on view through July 10, 2005.

The exhibition is comprised of approximately 160 works, organized chronologically in seven sections: Foundations and Systems (1994), a group of figurative charcoal, graphite and ink drawings; Computation of Chains (1995-98), featuring architecture-inspired drawings and the book Perfection, Way, Origin; Graphic Primitives (1998), woodcuts created with lasers that evoke both natural and synthetic forms; Location Plan (1999), featuring Winters’ designs for Trisha Brown Dance Company’s El Trilogy; Set Diagram (2000-02), twenty paintings out of a group of 100 one-yard by one-meter works that can be rearranged in any particular combination or configuration; Meshworks (1999-2002), large-scale graphite drawings of twisted spirals; and Turbulence Skins (2002-04), Winters’ most recent work, including his designs for Merce Cunningham Dance Company’s Loose Time.

Terry Winters/Paintings, Drawings, Prints/1994–2004 is organized by the Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts and curated by Adam Weinberg, former Director of the Addison Gallery and current Director of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Influenced by minimalist and process art of the 1960s and 1970s, Winters shifted his artistic focus in the early 1990s from organic and figurative forms to abstract imagery influenced by architecture and science. Terry Winters/Paintings, Drawings, Prints/1994-2004 marks this shift. His use of medical drawings, blueprints, computer graphics, and cellular diagrams as inspiration is evident in the abstracted forms of his work, which resemble information systems ranging from computer systems to diagrammatic renderings of neurons and brainwaves. Through his use of various media ranging from thick layers of oil paint to thin streams of ink and rough charcoal, Winters explores the confluence between biological and technical processes.

“Throughout his career, Terry Winters has pushed the envelope of abstraction, inventing a language of form that speaks to all through his highly personal yet universal work,” said Marti Mayo, director of the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. “His constantly evolving art is a wonderful example of the Contemporary Arts Museum’s mission to bring the most innovative art of our time to a local, national and international audience.”

Winters was born in 1949 in Brooklyn, New York. His work has been seen in numerous solo exhibitions at significant institutions. Most recently, a selection of his Location Plan drawings were shown at the Kunsthalle Basel in 2000, and the exhibition Terry Winters: Printed Works was organized by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2002. The artist lives and works in New York and Geneva, Switzerland.

Terry Winters/Paintings, Drawings, Prints/1994–2004 is accompanied by a comprehensive, fully-illustrated catalogue published by the Yale University Press in association with the Addison Gallery of American Art. The catalogue includes essays by Weinberg, Richard Shiff, Professor of Art, The University of Texas at Austin, and Rachel Teagle, assistant curator, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, extensive color and black-and-white reproductions of Winters’ work, and documentation on his career.