Fritz Winter

After the Second World War and his subsequent imprisonment, Fritz Winter returned to Germany in 1949 and initially returned to his pre-war painterly approaches. However, the colour structures and compositions increasingly opened up from the late 1950s and were completely liberated from 1960 onwards, so that the Große Mauer (Great Wall) works entirely without the previously popular lineaments in favour of individual colour gradations that determine the composition of the canvas.

With his titles, Fritz Winter attempted to reveal coded representations of the organic, earthbound and cosmic in his works, which were intended to visualise the sometimes inexplicable connections between evolution, the environment and elemental forces. This is also the case in our work Große Mauer. Despite the specific reference to the content, there is no clear interpretation of what might be hidden in front of or behind this great wall.

The luminosity of the blue, orange and red colour fields in this work is deliberately emphasised by the subtle nuances of the grey-brown blocks that actually predominate. The complexity of the artistic execution becomes apparent on closer study of the painting: the deliberately placed brushstrokes and colour changes of the large and small, adjacent and superimposed areas blur, merge and create an impressive depth effect and compositional balance. Fritz Winter once claimed to know 80 different shades of grey, as this colour tonality was indispensable for him. The Große Mauer can confirm this in all its differentiation.

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