Tyrrell Winston

(Orange County, California, 1985 - )

American

Tyrrell Winston’s artwork focuses primarily on the resonance of found objects, especially those related to the sport of basketball. The artist grew up in Southern California, and skateboarding, surfing, swimming, and basketball filled much of his childhood. He followed sports avidly, especially the Los Angeles Clippers in the National Basketball Association, and he describes playing professional basketball as his earliest aspiration. “While I’ve been a lifelong sports fan, it was never my intention to make a medium out of sports ephemera and sports materials,” he explains. Winston stopped playing competitive basketball during his freshman year of high school and instead began working toward a communications degree in California before transferring to Wagner College in Staten Island, where he entered an arts administration program.
After graduating in 2008, Winston worked as a freelance graphic designer and in arts programming for MTV, while also attending gallery openings and museum shows and gaining an increasing interest in making art of his own. A 2011 exhibition on Dada at the Museum of Modern Art was particularly significant for him, heightening his awareness of the potential of found objects. Winston describes his early work as “very angsty” and some of his earliest themes were anti-government and anti-police. However, having graduated from college during the 2008 recession with $150,000 in student loan debt, found objects became increasingly appealing for an aspiring artist who did not have money to buy materials, had no formal training, and enjoyed wandering around to get to know the streets and neighborhoods of New York City.Winston thus began collecting cigarette butts, discarded drug paraphernalia, fish tanks, and other objects, generally without an immediate plan for what to do with them. Eventually, they became three-dimensional assemblages and two-dimensional compositions, carrying with them the social connections and cultural associations of their source materials. Speaking of cigarettes, for example, Winston explains: “Each one of those cigarettes has a story—a conversation someone had, a thought. Something that really happened to a person. They’re fucking vile, but they’re also the ultimate sex symbol.”
Sports, and basketball in particular, remained significant for Winston during these explorations of found object work, particularly because used and discarded basketballs and nets were readily available during his walks around New York. During the late 2010s, the artist invented a process for displaying deflated basketballs in wall-mounted grids. Deceptively understated in their final form, controlling the appearance of these works requires making an incision in the back of each ball and filling it with epoxy resin to create an interior shell that holds a shape, before composing and mounting a group of balls with metal rods and plates—techniques that Winston developed through trial and error. As much as this process provides control, the artist does not seek to fully determine the appearance of his gridded works. Describing the texture of the found basketballs, he notes that “Weather is my favorite assistant, and that’s just something I have no desire to try to figure out how to manipulate or that I want to, because the ethos of the work is about all of these touches that are not mine.” These works propelled Winston to wider attention, 
with large grids purchased by the owners of the Cleveland Cavaliers (Dan Gilbert) and the 
Philadelphia 76ers (Michael Rubin) by 2020.
Winston has since created many varieties of found object and assemblage art with a continuing focus on basketball, using hoops, bleachers, cars, and more. Gaining confidence to work as a painter despite his lack of formal training, he has also created a series of “Punishment Paintings” in which he mimics and repeats the signatures of famous athletes like Michael Jordan, LeBron James, Pete Rose, and Mickey Mantle. The series’ title suggests a misbehaving student being assigned the punishment of writing the same phrase over and over on a chalkboard, and Winston further explains that the works are meant to suggest the punishingly high expectations placed on celebrities, including through the demand for autographs. Also related to sports memorabilia are works in which Winston signs his own autograph alongside an authentic signature from an athlete, an act that he describes as both desecration and homage. The “Punishment Paintings” take visual inspiration from Cy Twombly’s gestural paintings, while the added signatures draw from Rober Rauschenberg’s performative destruction of a drawing by Willem de Kooning. Winston gladly explains his interest in the work of these artists, as well as further influences such as Jeff Koons, Marcel Duchamp, David Hammons, and Cady Noland.

Detroit, Michigan

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