Reviewing an early Trevor Winkfield exhibition, poet John Ashbery concluded: "... an artist so totally out of touch with the present art scene as to make one wonder whether there is such a thing". Surely a puzzlement as applicable now as it was then. Early & Later spans the years 1976, when Winkfield took up the brush again after a nine-year hiatus, through 2010. Many of the works on view have never been exhibited before, or rarely seen since their initial exhibitions. Included here are the first of Winkfield's ongoing series of portraits, together with major examples from his Voyage and Vocations series. Also on view are preparatory collage studies Winkfield creates for the paintings. As the art critic Lance Esplund noted, "Chance has nothing to do with it: each painting is based on a meticulous full-scale collage of painted-paper cutouts, an origin that obviously contributes to the paintings' crisply delineated forms." Winkfield has often compared his working method to arranging notes on a musical score, a point noted by Ashbery when he also wrote, "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". 

Read a review of Trevor Winkfield's exhibition at MAB in artcritical

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. 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.