Fritz Winter belongs to the most important German representatives of abstract painting. Trained at the Bauhaus in Dessau with Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee and Oskar Schlemmer, his art was considered "degenerate" under National Socialism. With the group of works entitled "Driving Forces of the Earth" he created one of the most impressive testimonies of the artistic will to survive. After his return from Russian captivity in 1949, he founded the "Group of the Objectless" ZEN 49 with Willi Baumeister, Rupprecht Geiger, Theodor Werner and others. Since the 1950s he has received numerous important art prizes and celebrated international success. In the 1950s and 60s, Winter dealt with the new abstract tendencies of Informel and colour field painting.
Winter's complete oeuvre, which is varied in terms of painting technique and formal language, stands in a tradition that is equally committed to the art of the Blue Rider and the Bauhaus. With his largely non-representational formal language, the artist sought a superordinate reference to nature in order to make the hidden elementary forces and structures of creation visible: "It requires greater faith and greater power to make the invisible visible in a free design than to only always confirm the visible and tangible as such."
Fritz Winter formulated his artistic credo in 1950 as follows: "Every work is a statement about the unknown, or at least it should be."
