Karl Popper, one of the twentieth century’s most influential philosophers of science, suggests that the world can be divided into “clocks and clouds,” as in the title of this work. Clocks are orderly systems based on clear, predictable principles; clouds, on the other hand, are emergent, dynamic, and highly irregular.
Terry Winters brings this cloudlike sensibility to his abstract work. While Newman and his generation saw a painting as a transcendent or idealized space, Winters and many of his peers invested their abstract artworks with the unruly specificity of physical stuff. Grids wobble, perspectives shift or collapse, and paint—brushed, scraped, or washed over the surface of the canvas—behaves in unexpected ways. Winters approaches the natural world through multiple and intersecting rubrics of abstraction, such as scientific diagrams, musical scores, and decorative arts traditions from around the world.