EDINBURGH.- Ingleby’s exhibition programme for 2026 opens with an exhibition of work by the American painter Winston Roeth.

A master of edge and surface, Roeth’s colourfield paintings combine an apparently minimalist presentation with a maximalist viewing experience. Colour is everything, colour and light and an awareness of how paintings can command and delineate architectural space.

The paintings themselves operate within that space, changing in the light as the viewer moves around them. Roeth is an alchemist, mixing his pigments and applying them in velvety layers which reveal their secrets slowly. His compositions are distilled to this level of apparent simplicity through the most minimal ingredients. Sometimes the white of the wall becomes an active part of the painting, forming a geometric grid, at other times the picture itself is divided into a harmony of lines and colours, with the matt expanse of paint broken by shimmeringly luminous lines, while in others planes of a single colour are offset by a contradictory border: an edge on which the picture turns. In a world so accustomed to instant gratification Winston Roeth’s paintings require and reward an unusual level of contemplation.

At first glance Roeth’s painted panels of wood or slate appear very simple: flat planes of colour that look a certain way, but which shift in the changing light or as you move around them. They are exquisitely painted in layers of velvety pigment and reveal their secrets slowly: quiet combinations that play gentle tricks on the eye - simultaneously drawing the viewer into dense voids and bouncing the gaze back with a vibrant intensity. Roeth’s compositions are distilled to this apparent simplicity through the most minimal ingredients. Sometimes a picture is divided into grids, a geometric harmony of lines and colours, so that the matt expanse of paint is broken up by shimmeringly luminous lines in a perfect balance of light, depth and colour. Others combine planes of a single colour with a contradictory border: an edge on which the picture turns. In a world so accustomed to instant gratification Winston Roeth’s paintings require and reward an unusual level of contemplation.

Roeth is based in Beacon, New York State. He has exhibited extensively and his work is in many important collections, including the Museum Wiesbaden, Germany; PEAC Museum, Germany; The Albright Knox Art Gallery, USA; Colby College Museum of Art, USA; the Museum of Modern Art, NY, USA and the celebrated Panza Collection where his paintings form a site-specific installation in one of the gilded and panelled rooms of the C17th Palazzo Ducale in Sassuolo, Italy. Winston Roeth had a solo show at Ingleby Gallery in Spring 2011. Recent solo exhibitions include Speed of Light, Museum Weisbaden, Germany; an exhibition that surveyed 30 years work, Portrait without a face, Galerie Vera Munro, Germany and Fox Jensen McCrory Gallery, New Zealand.