Trevor Winkfield

Trevor Winkfield

The Mermaid's Revenge

Paintings 1991-2001

June 11 to July 31, 2026





“If all art aspires toward the condition of music, as Pater wrote, Trevor Winkfield must be counted among the most successful artists of all time.” — John Ashbery

Tibor de Nagy Gallery is pleased to present Trevor Winkfield: The Mermaid’s Revenge, an exhibition of paintings made between 1991 and 2001. This was an especially inventive and productive decade for Winkfield, who, working in a sizable studio, was able to realize a series of ambitious, large-scale paintings.

Born in England, Winkfield moved to New York in 1969 and settled here permanently. He quickly became part of a vibrant circle of New York artists and poets. Yet the imagery of his homeland remained indelibly inscribed in his imagination, particularly a medieval and ceremonial England of heraldry, chivalry, court jesters, and the symbolic language of orbs, swords, and scepters. It is to this imagined homeland that many of the paintings from the 1990s allude. In a catalogue devoted to these works, published in 1997, Jed Perl quoted the artist’s vivid memory of Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation in 1953. Winkfield recalled being struck by “all the ceremony and religious ritual, particularly the handing over of the regalia from archbishop to sovereign, and the hierarchical poses adopted by the sovereign when weighted down by the regalia.”

At the same time, these paintings embrace a distinctly modern language of abstraction and complex Pop color, uniting their imagery into tableaux of idealized forms. As Ashbery suggests, form and subject are inseparable in Winkfield’s work. The painting's strange juxtapositions and narrative hints are like music in creating less a fixed story than a kind of pinball movement through themes and variations. Throughout his career, Winkfield’s painting has been deeply informed by poetry, including the work of his friends John Ashbery and James Schuyler. He has also been an avid reader and translator of absurdist literature, especially the writings of Raymond Roussel. His delight in wordplay, puns, and double entendre finds a visual analogue in his paintings of wit, elegance, and invention.

Since the 1970s, Winkfield has had numerous solo exhibitions in New York and elsewhere. Over the course of his career, he has received many honors, including a Pollock-Krasner Award and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. In 2002, he was named Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government. In addition to his work as a painter, Winkfield has written extensively on art in essays and reviews. He is the author of Georges Braque & Others: The Selected Art Writings of Trevor Winkfield, 1990–2009 and How I Became a Painter: Trevor Winkfield in Conversation with Miles Champion.