Dark Plants 12
Terry Winters
American, born 1949
1982
A large charcoal-and-oil-crayon drawing in which Terry Winters investigates the border between organic growth and mapped structure, rendering ambiguous, plant‑like forms as a dense black mass punctuated by spiky, tentative outlines.
What catches the eye is the deep, rubbed black shape low on the sheet—its surface scored, scraped, and smudged like a fossil or clump of foliage—while lighter, jagged linear sketches hover above in a smoky, atmospheric field.
Part of Winters’s ’Dark Plants’ work, this drawing helped broaden late‑20th‑century abstraction by treating drawing as a mode of speculative, quasi‑scientific thinking that fuses biomorphic suggestion with graphic systems and tactile process.
Medium
Oil crayon and charcoal on paper
Dimensions
41 3/4 x 29 7/8" (106.0 x 75.7 cm)
Classification
Department
Credit
Purchase
Accession
450.1982
Palette
Art Terms
Exhibitions
