Ingleby | Winston Roeth

31 January - 28 March 2026

  • WINSTON ROETH

  • Ingleby’s exhibition programme for 2026 opens with an exhibition of work by the American painter Winston Roeth.

     

    A master of edge and surface, Roeth’s colourfield paintings combine an apparently minimalist presentation with a maximalist viewing experience. Colour is everything, colour and light and an awareness of how paintings can command and delineate architectural space.

     

    The paintings themselves operate within that space, changing in the light as the viewer moves around them. Roeth is an alchemist, mixing his pigments and applying them in velvety layers which reveal their secrets slowly. His compositions are distilled to this level of apparent simplicity through the most minimal ingredients. Sometimes the white of the wall becomes an active part of the painting, forming a geometric grid, at other times the picture itself is divided into a harmony of lines and colours, with the matt expanse of paint broken by shimmeringly luminous lines, while in others planes of a single colour are offset by 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 of Modern Art, New York, USA; Museum Wiesbaden, Germany; The Albright Knox Art Gallery, USA; Benesse House Museum, Naoshima, Japan; 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, Varese, Italy. He celebrated his 80th birthday last Autumn and following a major museum retrospective in Wiesbaden in 2020, and a new monograph in 2025, we are delighted to host our first exhibition of his work since 2011.

  • Installation view of Winston Roeth's solo exhibition, Ingleby, Edinburgh. Photograph: John McKenzie.
  • Winston Roeth
    Stones of Gold, 2025
    Kremer pigments and polyurethane dispersion on slate in eighteen (18) parts
    188.4 x 198 cm (artwork)
    74 1/8 x 78 in
  • 'In 1974, an Italian conservator friend, Piero Mannoni, introduced me to the colour of raw pigments, and I began experimenting....
    (detail) Stones of Gold, 2025
    "In 1974, an Italian conservator friend, Piero Mannoni, introduced me to the colour of raw pigments, and I began experimenting. Over the years my experience using pigments grew. Pigments held within them a complex knowledge and history. Their material colour had the potential to become light, which has the energy of illumination. Light that could jump out and grab the viewer, or chroma that can pulse with a deep glow. These traits are not illusions, they’re real. This is the energy of colour when it becomes light."
    - Winston Roeth in conversation with Jörg Daur in Looking for the Speed of Light, Museum Wiesbaden, 2020
     
     
  • Installation view of Winston Roeth's solo exhibition, Ingleby, Edinburgh. Photograph: John McKenzie.
  • Winston Roeth
    Lines of Light, 2023
    Kremer pigments and polyurethane dispersion on Dibond mounted on basswood in nine (9) parts
    264 x 264 cm (artwork)
    104 x 104 in
  • “When I’m painting and a colour emerges that is illuminated, that one can feel, it strikes me that the illumination...
    (detail) Lines of Light, 2023
    “When I’m painting and a colour emerges that is illuminated, that one can feel, it strikes me that the illumination is real and not an illusion. This is the difference between a colour that is dead and one that’s alive. There seems to be a difference, at least in my mind, between the illusion and the reality of illumination."
    - WR
  • Winston Roeth
    Decatur, 2025
    Kremer pigments and polyurethane dispersion on Dibond mounted on basswood in two (2) parts
    100 x 151 cm (artwork)
    39 3/8 x 59 1/2 in
  • 'I’m not interested in arranging colours to decide which ones go together. If a colour is honest and clear, it...
    (detail) Decatur, 2025
    "I’m not interested in arranging colours to decide which ones go together. If a colour is honest and clear, it can hang with any other colour that has clarity."
    - WR
  • Winston Roeth
    Tuscola, 2025
    Kremer pigments and polyurethane dispersion on Dibond mounted on basswood in two (2) parts
    100.6 x 149.5 cm (artwork)
    39 5/8 x 58 7/8 in
  • Winston Roeth
    Cadmium, 2022
    polyurethane dispersion and cadmium pigments on fifteen (15) slates
    157.5 x 162.6 cm
    62 x 64 in
  • 'What I liked about painting on slate tiles is the surface of the material. I use the same technique for...
    (detail) Cadmium, 2022
    "What I liked about painting on slate tiles is the surface of the material. I use the same technique for smooth surfaces and apply the same paint on slate. Slate always shows its material structure through the surface, like a ‘low relief’. That was the same reason I chose rough cut wood panels. There is a structure there that was revealed by the natural grain of the wood and the industrial process used to saw the logs into boards. All of it is physical information."
    - WR
  • Winston Roeth
    Shades of Darkness, 2014
    Kremer pigments and polyurethane dispersion on eight (8) poplar panels
    252 x 102 cm
    99 1/4 x 40 1/8 in
  • (detail) Shades of Darkness, 2014
  • Winston Roeth
    Golden Square, 2025
    Kremer pigments on Dibond mounted on basswood
    91.4 x 91.4 cm (artwork)
    36 x 36 in
  • “The paintings with borders have been referred to as 'space paintings’. Early on I called them ‘containment’ paintings. The border...
    “The paintings with borders have been referred to as 'space paintings’. Early on I called them ‘containment’ paintings. The border contained the energy the colour and amplified the internal light. It was also a way for me to break free of the single-colour monochrome. The borders had a visual speed about them, the speed of light as they surrounded the interior colour which was ‘dry’ and ’slow’. Two rather simple elements with complex visual results."
    - WR
  • Winston Roeth
    Pemaquid, 2008
    Kremer pigments and polyurethane dispersion on two (2) cedar panels
    55.4 x 76.3 cm (artwork)
    21 3/4 x 30 in

  • For more information and artwork enquiries, please get in touch at info@inglebygallery.com

     

    Gallery Hours

    Wednesday - Saturday, 11 am - 5 pm, or by appointment

    Ingleby Gallery, 33 Barony Street, Edinburgh, EH3 6NX