Michael Winters' Dissected by time and space at Orange Regional Gallery is bold

Michael Winters is one of Canberra's most recognised artists, who has been teaching and exhibiting in the nation's capital for several decades.

Winters is an unusual, thinking and probing artist whose life and artistic vision are built around a number of contradictions. Born in Frankston, in Melbourne, Winters became a passionate philhellene and is more at home on the Greek Island of Leros than in Australia. While he is basically a realist and representational artist, Winters in his art sets himself some of the most probing and challenging conceptual problems imaginable and then tries to resolve them as realistically as possible.

In 1965, when Winters was 22 years old, he embarked on his first trip to Europe and encountered a world that was in a state of flux and rapid change. The day he arrived in London, May 26, 1967, the Beatles released their eighth studio album, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, and less than two years later, Apollo 11 landed on the moon. To the young Australian artist, the world seemed to have changed forever and the old mythologies and the old ways of seeing things and thinking about the landscape were no longer adequate. We were seeing the earth for the first time from an entirely new perspective and, to Winters, the old conventions for viewing the landscape needed to change and to take into account fresh developments in physics, cosmology and astrophysics in the understanding of time and space.

The challenge that Winters set himself was to create a new image of the landscape for a new age, one that would take into account the traditional terrestrial landscape, which we can experience on a sensory level, as well as the landscape that was revealed for the first time through space travel and astrophysics with its concepts of dark matter and black holes, and the images revealed through the Hubble Space Telescope. This new landscape was mediated through technology and was as much a conceptual landscape, about which we had theories, as a landscape encountered in photographs, some of which were taken in space or were of space.

The exhibition at the Orange Regional Gallery consists of Winters' constructed sculptural landscapes that he has made over the past half-dozen years. It is the work of a mature artist, one who has had half a century of art making behind him. The problem that he has set himself is a new way of seeing the landscape – inside out, from within and from above – all of this simultaneously. Whereas the classical landscape is predicated on the idea of a single viewpoint and a unity in time and space, Winters sets out to explore multiple viewpoints and a disjunction in time and space. Instead of creating an illusion behind which to hide, he, in a practical, almost naive manner, has excavated his canvas and reassembled it to create this hybrid three-dimensional model of his idea. Bits of the landscape have been peeled away to expose a layering of planes, bits jutting out in space as if the heavens have been ripped apart and we are viewing a time from before and into the future. The artist speaks of black holes, dark matter, dark energy and cosmic vortexes.

Winters feels that new developments in science demand a response from the artist and it is a response that has to go beyond the literal transcription of the landscape that is before him. However, he is an artist and not a scientist, so while drawing on developments in scientific thought, his contribution is at the same time deeply personal and is as much about aging and mortality as it is about the realisation of the magnitude of the cosmos.

In the exhibition, there are many provocative formal innovations, such as the quirky bits of carpentry, scarification, penetrations and overlapping layering of planes, all referring to the multifaceted approach to time and space, but there is also much that is very personal. Much of it is self-referential; it is about Winters' passions, loves and fears. His beloved Greek island of Leros, the Australian bush with its sun-bleached gumtrees, glimpses of the Macquarie River or Mount Canobolas are frequently inserted within the compositions with dimensional elements and swirling masses distancing them and putting them more inaccessible and out of reach. The Small Greek landscape cradled by time or Greek churches, a totem of time and spaces, burnt remnants, for me, are pictures that are surrounded by dark clouds of melancholy and reflection.

Winters' Dissected by time and space is a bold, provocative and deeply personal exhibition, which can be interpreted on a number of different levels. Each sculptural painting opens up slowly and gradually as the layers of meaning peel away and frequently beyond the spiky protrusions, suspended disks and layers of dark concealment, there emerges quite a vulnerable heart in each work that marks the passing of time and life, yet something beautiful and precious remains.