Fritz Winter

Fritz Winter is one of the most celebrated German abstract painters of the 1950s. Absorbing the lessons of his Bauhaus teachers Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky, Winter practiced a soft-edged, biomorphic style of painting characterized by forms that often resembled characters or glyphs—a type of universal language that seemed all the more urgent following the devastating nationalism of World War II. Like many artists at this time who worked in a “formless” abstract style (Art Informel), Winter saw abstract painting as a regenerative antidote to the horrors of the war in which he fought. He was included in the very first Documenta exhibition, a now celebrated art world institution, and taught for decades at the Fine Art Academy in Kassel, Germany.