Terry Winters: Vitalized Geometry Now on View at The Menil Collection

Terry Winters: Vitalized Geometry on view from September 25, 2026–April 4, 2027

The Menil Collection celebrates the gift of graphic works in Terry Winters: Vitalized Geometry.

Two gifts to the museum will be displayed in an exhibition tracing nearly four decades of the artist’s works. This exhibition, Terry Winters: Vitalized Geometry of approximately 44 career spanning works, is organized in close consultation with Terry Winters.

Celebrating two groups of gifts to the Menil, the presentation focuses on the artist’s graphic production.

In 2024, photographer Jack Shear and the estate of his late husband, artist Ellsworth Kelly, gifted 51 works to the museum, constituting examples of nearly three-quarters of Winters’s prints from the 1980s. In May 2026, the artist added to this group, offering seven works to the museum, including recently produced Azimuth, 2024; Round, 2022; and Red Stone, 2019.

Rebecca Rabinow, Director, The Menil Collection, said, “Terry Winters: Vitalized Geometry is a celebration of the Menil Collection’s longstanding admiration for and relationship with the artist. When Winters, an inaugural member of the Menil Drawing Institute Committee, spoke at the museum in February 2017, he explained that for him, drawing is a way of understanding prints and vice versa, as he intuitively works between mediums. Winters’s prints are seductively beguiling. We are proud to present them, and thanks to the artist’s generosity, delighted to add so many to the Menil’s permanent collection.”

Showcasing the breadth of graphic techniques the artist employs in woodcut, silkscreen, lithography, and a variety of other methods, this exhibition explores the importance of printmaking to Winters’s practice and its dialogue with drawing and painting.

According to Winters, “Each medium is an instrument. Almost in a musical sense, meant to be played; and each affects the developing imagery. How they look, how they feel, and what they mean is conditioned by the materials and procedures. Media is used to embody an image actual size, as vitalized geometry—hopefully with a sense of life.”

The Menil now has 76 works by Winters in its permanent collection, one of the most significant holdings of the artist’s work in the United States, alongside New York institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Whitney Museum of American Art.

It is FREE to visit The Menil Collection.

Winters will present an Artist Talk at the Menil on January 28, 2027, at 7 p.m.

About Terry Winters

Terry Winters is a painter, draughtsman, and printmaker who lives and works in New York City and Columbia County, New York. A graduate of the Pratt Institute, Winters is among a generation of artists who in the 1980s began exploring new modes of representation within the historical languages of abstraction.

His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at numerous museums, including the Whitney Museum of Art, New York (1991); Whitechapel Art Gallery, London (1999); the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2001); and the Drawing Center,
New York (2018).

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Photos courtesy of The Menil Collection