American Art Collaborative

In 2008 Terry Winters collaborated with the Grenfell Press in New York to create a portfolio of nine relief prints in two shades of blue ink. The poet Eliot Weinberger wrote a text for the portfolio and also gave the group of prints a descriptive title, In Blue. Two years later Winters, whose artistic production moves fluidly between the mediums of painting, printmaking, and drawing, made this large-scale painting of the same title using closely related imagery: clusters of blossom-like shapes derived from knot theory, a specialized form of mathematics. A knot in this context is defined as a closed curve—like a length of rope whose ends are joined together—that wraps around itself. For Winters, such visual and conceptual sources generate new possibilities for abstraction. This painting’s grid structure, which echoes the rectangular shape of the print portfolio’s paper sheets, functions as an organizing structure for the cascading knot forms.