MUNICH.- For over thirty years now, the painter and draftsman Terry Winters (born in New York in 1949) has been one of the most inventive and productive printmakers of his generation.

From the start, the imagination of this peintre-graveur has revolved around spaces and systems beyond the visible. In all of the media of which he is master, Winters has conducted an unbroken search for a metaphysics of hidden forces and energies whose forms transcend the creative process.

The specific challenge represented by printmaking for Winters is due to the close relationship between the demands inherent to the medium, and to the unexpected liberties it again and again offers.

It is not only the close interaction between drawing and painting that enriches Winters’ art, but that between painting and printmaking, both of which – for decades – have equally inspired his work to a degree that the artist can justifiably speak of a “cross-breeding” between the genres.

Winters’ postulate, “invent, test, and play,” advanced years ago to describe his intentions as a draftsman, applies perfectly to his approach to printmaking as well. Compared with the practice of the classical painter-engraver, Winters derives his metamorphoses not from the process of reworking plates or producing a series of state impressions. Instead, he relies on a playful testing of mechanisms that render scales and patterns ambivalent and generate new imagery which keeps associations as open-ended as possible. Just this medium, in concert with drawing and painting, has permitted him to translate highly diverse codes into new, sensuous contexts through complex processes of transfer and printing, leading to an essential archetype and abstraction.

Following the Munich exhibition of Terry Winters’ drawings in 2003, the current exhibition of 150 works presents a survey of his output as a printmaker since 1999. The works are also documented in a catalogue raisonné (with an essay by Michael Semff and detailed descriptions of the works by Elisabeth Finch of Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine, published by Prestel Verlag, New York).

The exhibition is presented in close cooperation with Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville , Maine . After Munich , it will be shown at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk from 18.06.2015 to 30.08.2015.