Trevor Winkfield

Trevor Winkfield was born in Leeds, England in 1944. He received an Intermediate Certificate in Art from Leeds College of Art followed by an M.A. at the Royal College of Art in London. He moved to New York City in 1969. Winkfiled has been deeply involved through life long friendships and projects including book cover designs, poetry journals and collaborative projects with poets from the New York School, including John Ashbery and James Schuyler.

His paintings are highly refined collage-like constructions, meticulously created. Suggestions of narratives peek around the hard edge corners of the stylized paintings. Poetical metaphors abound. It is essential to look closer, deeper and thoughtfully to unpack the complex meanings in Winkfield’s rich graphic works.

His work is in the collections of the Berkeley Art Museum, CA, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. He has been the recipient of awards from Yaddo, Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Purchase Prize as well as a Chevalier in l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres from the French government.

Curriculum Vitae

Trevor Winkfield in Cable Street

Around forty years ago, a gallery owner paid a visit to my studio and after studying my paintings for a while observed, “I like your paintings but I don’t know where I am in them.” That was the last I saw of him, but I took his comment as a compliment, not a rebuke. I now take it as a given that there is no ideal entry point into my paintings, nor do they have a single meaning. Early on I took to heart Marcel Duchamp’s dictum, “It’s the spectator who completes the work of art”: your interpretation is as valid as my own, an offer which should not be mistaken for indecision.

All images reproduced courtesy of the Artist and Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York.

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by John Yau

March 3, 2018

While I was on my way to see his current exhibition, Trevor Winkfield – Saints, Dancers and Acrobats, at Tibor de Nagy Gallery (February 17 – March 25, 2018), I began to wonder — as someone who has followed his work since the late 1970s, and who has read many of the things written on his work, as well as much of his own writing — if I could add anything to what has already been said.

Winkfield begins with a collage, which is a hybrid of geometric forms and representational motifs rendered in solid colors. Whether the resulting image is a bird or an unidentifiable thingamajig, it is composed of outlined abstract shapes, which may be patterned or solidly colored. Over the years the artist has accumulated a vocabulary that ranges from heraldry to cartoony biomorphism, from crisp patterns to sly nods to artists he admires, such as Rene Magritte, Piet Mondrian and Kazimir Malevich. Along the way, he seems to have become an expert in vexillology, the study of flags.