Tyrrell Winston (b. 1985, Orange County, California) lives and works in Detroit. He moved to New York to study arts administration at Wagner College, graduating in 2008, and is self taught as an artist: the practice began in a period after college when he could not find work and started collecting paper scraps off the street. It grew into an obsessive collection of discarded objects, deflated basketballs, cigarette butts, tarpaulins, worn nets, gathered from the streets and courts of Manhattan and Brooklyn and assembled into grids and wall sculptures. Every net he takes is replaced with a new one, so the work cannot exist without the exchange: it is part public service and part examination of what he calls embedded history, the narrative left behind in things other people have finished with. He grew up wanting to play professionally, and uses sport deliberately as a way into an art world he considers exclusionary, elsewhere signing his own name onto authenticated Michael Jordan memorabilia, painting athletes' signatures in a nod to Cy Twombly's blackboard paintings, and rendering game results in the manner of On Kawara's date paintings.
His first solo museum exhibition, A Tiger's Stripes, opened at the Cranbrook Art Museum in 2022. Solo exhibitions include Encore at Library Street Collective, Detroit (2020), Life in the Fast Lane at Volery Gallery, Dubai (2024), and shows at Allouche Benias in Athens, Gana Art in Seoul, Stems Gallery in Brussels, Hidari Zingaro in Tokyo, Gallery Steinsland Berliner in Stockholm and Landmark & Belowground in Hong Kong. His work has been included in group exhibitions at the MSU Broad Art Museum, at Arsenal Contemporary in New York and at Carl Kostyál in Stockholm.
In 2023 Winston took part in the group exhibition Tutti Frutti 2 at Plan X Capri.
