Fritz Winter was born in 1905 in Altenbögge, near Unna, in Germany. After apprenticing as a mining electrician and working underground as an electrician and miner, he studied from 1927 to 1930 at the Bauhaus in Dessau under Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky and others. From 1929 to 1930 he stayed repeatedly at Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s house in Davos. In 1930 he moved to Berlin, painting more and more in a non-representational manner. Under the National Socialists his art was considered “degenerate”; his works were confiscated and he was prohibited from painting. While a soldier he made field sketches on which he would base his later group of works Triebkräfte der Erde (Driving Forces of the World). He returned from a prisoner-of-war camp in Russia in 1949, and in that same year was a founding member of ZEN 49 in the Galerie Stangl in Munich. His pictures increasingly focused on elemental natural forces. Winter was represented at the 25th Venice Biennale in 1950, as well as at two documenta exhibitions. From 1955 to 1970 he taught at Kassel’s art school, the Staatliche Hochschule für bildende Künste. In 1974 he was awarded the Federal Republic’s Grand Order of Merit with Star, and in the following year he opened the Fritz-Winter-Haus in Ahlen. The artist died in 1976 in Herrsching am Ammersee.
