Bryan Wynter is a central figure in post-war British abstraction who, perhaps more than any other British painter, embodied the ethos of the post-War New York school ­ its energy, its existentialism and the use of non-art stimulants such as poetry, music and drugs (in Wynter's case mescalin) as a means of discovering universal truths in painting ­ although Wynter's trademark style, a dense web of black calligraphic marks interwoven with splashes of colour, was already fully developed by the time Abstract Expressionism was first shown at the Tate in 1956.

 

Wynter wasn't afraid to let his work evolve and his paintings of the 60s are radically different ­ flat, graphic, their curvilinear forms evoking the slow movement of water. It was at this time that Wynter also began to make three-dimensional kinetic works ­ IMOOS (Images Moving Out Onto Space).

 

His work can be found in museum collections world-wide, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Major retrospectives have been held at the Hayward Gallery in 1976 and Tate St Ives in 2001.