Fritz Winter

Fritz Winter Before red 1961 Oil on canvas. 131 x 97 cm. Framed with studio molding. Bottom right signed and dated in black 'FWinter 61'. Signed, dated and titled on the reverse of the canvas 'Before Red FWinter 61'. - In good condition. Lohberg 2383 with full-page illus. no. 126 Provenance Foundation of the artist, Bavarian State Painting Collections, Munich (Inv.No. HST:1204, on the stretcher with the label), transferred to the Fritz Winter Foundation, Munich (Inv.No. 121, on the stretcher with the handwritten designation); private collection North Rhine-Westphalia. Fritz Winter's work phase in the early 1960s is characterized by an extraordinary lightness and openness. Here, loosely placed areas that structurally stand out from one another overlap in front of a light pictorial background - in part softly and thinly applied bands of color, in part short hatchings angularly placed with a dry brush. Nature was Fritz Winter's most important source of inspiration from the very beginning. The world in the smallest and in the largest, elements of the microcosm and the macrocosm underlie his abstract compositions. In the course of his creative period, his aspiration was no less than the visualization and ordering of universally valid principles. The means of expression he found for this changed over the decades. "One thing is certain, I am like a farmer who plows his field anew every year, and again and again the clods fall differently, but the soil remains the same. One thing is certain [...], we may circle around the earth, but we have not yet come any closer to it ourselves," Winter wrote to the gallery owner Günther Franke in 1967 (quoted in: Fritz Winter. Vom Bauhaus zur documenta, exh. Cat. Galerie Utermann 2018, p. 28). The large-format "Vor Rot" fascinates with its scriptural structures, which challenge decoding, and the exciting color chords ranging from earthy-soft nuances to strong magenta.