Winter, Fritz

Description:

Altenbögge, 1905 - Herrsching am Ammersee, 1976
170 x 135 cm, R.
"Großes Zeichen", 1963. Oil on canvas. Signed, dated and titled in oil on the reverse
Lohberg, 2485.
Fritz - Winter - Atelier, Diessen am Ammersee.
Collection Monika and Horst Bülow, Leonberg, acquired there in 2017.
Fritz Winter is considered one of the most important representatives of abstract painting in postwar Germany. As a student of the Bauhaus in Dessau, where he studied from 1927 to 1930 under, among others, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and Oskar Schlemmer, he early developed an independent pictorial language that combined formal rigor with expressive colour and gestural brushwork.
The monumental painting "Großes Zeichen" from 1963 marks a high point in his mature work. Measuring 170 × 135 cm, it unfolds a powerful presence that immediately captivates the viewer. Against a brown-gray ground, vigorously applied black forms overlap, structuring the pictorial space like tectonic constructions. Between these massive, almost calligraphic shapes, intense colour fields in red, blue, and yellow emerge - primary accents that, in contrast to the dark forms, create a dynamic balance of energy and stillness.
Winter did not understand such "Zeichen" ("signs") as direct depictions but as visual ciphers for inner experiences, existential states, and a spiritual engagement with world and nature. The "Großes Zeichen" is therefore less a symbol in the conventional sense than an expression of painting as a universal language, arising from the tension between form and colour, surface and space, light and darkness.
In the 1950s and 1960s, Winter was celebrated as a central figure of the group ZEN 49 and as an internationally recognized representative of German postwar modernism. His works were shown at documenta I (1955) and documenta II (1959) in Kassel and entered major public collections such as the Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlung, the Nationalgalerie Berlin, and the Museum Ludwig, Cologne.
The present work is an outstanding example of the force and clarity of Fritz Winter’s late style, in which he condensed his pictorial language of signs into large-scale, highly concentrated compositions.