cover image Terry Winters

Terry Winters

Lisa Phillips. ABRAMS, $75 (202pp) ISBN 978-0-8109-3963-9

American artist Terry Winters conjures an ambiguous universe using organic images suggestive of cells, mushrooms, spores, shells, DNA strands and octopuses. Meditating on crystals and fossils, he dreams science into art. His shifting spaces and forms that open up, close down, warp and deform seem attuned to fractal geometry, computer mapping, even the astronomy of black holes. In this catalogue of an exhibit now at the Whitney Museum in New York, Phillips, a Whitney curator, interprets Winters's sensual yet cooly formal pictures as metaphors of artistic growth and investigations of both creative and entropic processes. Kertess, adjunct curator of drawings, probes the artist's secular sense of wonder. Among the 212 plates (164 in color) of paintings, prints and drawings are sexually suggestive forms with affinities to Georgia O'Keeffe's modernist experiments and charcoal sketches that turn Gothic tracery into biomorphic images of erotic unfolding. (Apr.)