Tibor de Nagy is pleased to present an exhibition of recent paintings by Trevor Winkfield. The exhibition titled Saints, Dancers and Acrobats will be Winkfield’s ninth solo show at the gallery, and his first at the gallery’s new Rivington Street location.

Over several decades, Winkfield has been working a consistent and methodical style of vibrantly colored, hard-edged painting. For this exhibition, Winkfield focuses on figures - saints, dancers and acrobats and others depicted ready to engage in their respective roles. In these works from the past four years, he continues his practice of first making collages that the final paintings are based upon. With this method, he juxtaposes recognizable objects with fantasy or morphs forms into hybrids of the everyday and the uncanny. The overall effect is that of dreamscapes or pop surrealist tableaus. Through the rhythm of shape and form, these works are infused with an intense energy and always executed with meticulous precision.

Throughout Winkfield’s career, his painting has been informed and influenced by poetry, including the work of his friends John Ashbery and James Schuyler. He is also a devotee of absurdist literature, especially the works of Raymond Roussel, whose writings he has translated. Winkfield has a passion for word play, puns and double entendres that in his paintings become a source of deft visual play.

Trevor Winkfield, born in 1944, moved to New York from his native England in 1969. He has had many solo exhibitions over the last 20 years. Currently he has a solo exhibition at the Milton Art Bank in Milton, Pennsylvania, on view until April 21. He recently had a two person exhibition (with Kate Abercrombie) at Fleisher/Ollman in Philadelphia. He has received numerous awards, including a Pollock-Krasner Award and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. In 2002, Winkfield was awarded the Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Artes et des Lettres by the French government.

Winkfield is also a writer, and has written extensively about art, in essays and reviews. He is the author of two books 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.