At first glance Roeth’s painted panels of wood or slate appear very simple: flat planes of colour that look a certain way, but which shift in the changing light or as you move around them. They are exquisitely painted in layers of velvety pigment and reveal their secrets slowly: quiet combinations that play gentle tricks on the eye - simultaneously drawing the viewer into dense voids and bouncing the gaze back with a vibrant intensity. Roeth’s compositions are distilled to this apparent simplicity through the most minimal ingredients. Sometimes a picture is divided into grids, a geometric harmony of lines and colours, so that the matt expanse of paint is broken up by shimmeringly luminous lines in a perfect balance of light, depth and colour. Others combine planes of a single colour with a contradictory border: an edge on which the picture turns. In a world so accustomed to instant gratification Winston Roeth’s paintings require and reward an unusual level of contemplation.
Roeth is based in Beacon, New York State. He has exhibited extensively and his work is in many important collections, including the Museum Wiesbaden, Germany; PEAC Museum, Germany; The Albright Knox Art Gallery, USA; Colby College Museum of Art, USA; the Museum of Modern Art, NY, USA and the celebrated Panza Collection where his paintings form a site-specific installation in one of the gilded and panelled rooms of the C17th Palazzo Ducale in Sassuolo, Italy. Winston Roeth had a solo show at Ingleby Gallery in Spring 2011. Recent solo exhibitions include Speed of Light, Museum Weisbaden, Germany; an exhibition that surveyed 30 years work, Portrait without a face, Galerie Vera Munro, Germany and Fox Jensen McCrory Gallery, New Zealand.
