Collection of Suzanne and Howard Feldman Matthew Marks Gallery, New York
Exhibited
Los Angeles, Museum of Contemporary Art, Terry Winters, September 15, 1991 - January 12, 1992, then traveled to New York, Whitney Museum of American Art (February 13 - May 3, 1992) New York, Matthew Marks Gallery, Terry Winters 1981-1986, November 6 - December 24, 2004
Literature
L. Phillips, K. Kertess, Terry Winters, exh. cat., Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1992, p. 51 (illustrated) Terry Winters 1981-1986, exh. cat., Matthew Marks Gallery, New York, 2004, pl. 10 (illustrated)
Catalogue Essay
The present lot, Free Union, 1983 represents an early masterpiece by American painter Terry Winters. Winters' pieces from the 1980’s find their visual foundation in biology and the natural world, locating themselves in direct opposition to the starkness of the 1970’s Minimalist and Conceptualist movements. With its delicate and exquisite brushwork, Free Union depicts Umbrian red and earthy brown modular structures, which appear to float upon a pulsating, reflective pond. The artist’s painterly organic shapes emerge at various stages of formation, slowly making their way to the surface of the composition. Free Union, 1983 has been aptly described by curator Lisa Phillips as “one of Winters's most striking works from this period, irregular fan-shaped membranes floating like apparitions on a silvery, vaporous ground, where bits of rudimentary, cellular matter surface and dissolve. The feeling of genesis is unmistakable here: the filmy space of biological lowlife is where identity begins.”(Lisa Phillips in Terry Winters, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1991)