Fritz Winter

Provenance:

Fritz Winter Foundation, Munich

Private collection, North Rhine-Westphalia

The mid-1950s marked a particularly productive and stylistically consolidated phase in Fritz Winter’s work. After the existentialist works of the immediate post-war period, he found his way to a more open, abstract visual language in which colour, form and space entered into a balanced relationship of tension. In the works of this period, encounters no longer take place narratively, but in the immediate relationship between the pictorial elements. At the same time, Winter gained international recognition: in 1955, he was prominently represented at the first documenta in Kassel, where one of his major works was presented in a central position. In the same year, he was appointed professor in Kassel and received international awards, which firmly established his position as one of the leading voices in post-war abstract art.

In Begegnung (Encounter) from 1956, Fritz Winter unfolds a multi-layered, tension-filled composition of coloured surfaces, linear elements and differently structured zones. The picture field is not organised hierarchically, but appears as an open space in which forms approach, overlap and contradict each other.

The starting point for the composition were strong colour fields in magenta, green, red, violet and black, which were then partially or completely covered with grey and light green in large, impasto layers using a palette knife. The remaining colour accents appear to float and yet are firmly anchored in the pictorial structure. The large oval field in rich magenta with a green centre on the right-hand side of the picture forms an energetic pole to which the smaller, freely placed forms respond. The colour accents seem to float and are at the same time firmly anchored in the pictorial structure.

Dark, partly angular lines and broken bar shapes run diagonally and vertically through the composition. They are reminiscent of schematic signs or figurative hints, without becoming clearly concrete. Characteristic of Winter’s painting at this time is the interplay of controlled placement and free, almost improvised brushwork. The visible brush and palette knife marks lend the work a physical presence and make the painting process itself tangible: colour appears not only as a means of design, but as an independent, effective force.