Winter, Fritz

Description:

Altenbögge, 1905 - Herrsching am Ammersee, 1976
75 x 100 cm, R.
"Rot - Grün”, 1954. Oil on cardboard. Signed and dated in incision lower left; additionally signed, dated and titled in pencil on the reverse.
Lohberg, 1717.
Galerie Heimeshoff, Essen.
Collection Monika und Horst Bülow, Leonberg, acquired there in 1985.
"Rot - Grün" (1954) shows Fritz Winter at the height of his maturity. After Bauhaus training and the formative experiences of the war, Winter developed an abstract language balancing structure with free colour resonance. This canvas belongs to those 1950s works in which he fuses the principles of Informel with constructive clarity.
On a deep black ground, luminous rectangular fields in yellow, orange, and red stand out as vibrating colour bodies. They are interwoven with linear structures in raised, relief-like material. A charged interplay arises between plane and line, between the energetic glow of colour and the earthy tactility of collage-like elements. Winter unites movement and stasis, light and shadow, colour and form in an ensemble at once stringent and vital.
The title "Rot - Grün" is not a merely descriptive note on visible pigments - conspicuously, green appears absent at first glance. Rather, Winter uses it conceptually. Red and green are complementary opposites in colour theory - emblems of polarity, tension, and energetic balance. In this abstract world the title denotes not specific hues but the inner dialectic of the composition: the counterplay of light and dark, plane and line, energy and repose. Thus, the title points to the mental sphere in which the painting unfolds its fullest meaning.
Created during a crucial phase for Winter’s standing in postwar abstraction, the work exemplifies how he conferred new existential depth and constructive lucidity on abstract painting - a trajectory affirmed by documenta I (1955) and his teaching in Kassel. A canvas of rare radiance and painterly density, it encapsulates the characteristic tension in Winter’s oeuvre between colour resonance and structure, freedom and order.