"Fritz Winter. documenta-Künstler der ersten Stunde"
Neue Galerie, Kassel
Exhibition until 21 February 2021
The exhibition in the Neue Galerie will feature around 90 works of painting, graphic art and sculpture.
65 years ago, on 16 July 1955, the first documenta opened its doors in Kassel. As a former Bauhaus student and one of the most highly regarded German painters of the post-war period, Fritz Winter was invited by Arnold Bode to participate in this first major international survey exhibition with seven paintings. Winter's appearance at the Museum Fridericianum was spectacular: for a front wall of the Large Painting Hall he painted the six-metre-wide abstract "Composition in Front of Blue and Yellow", whose juxtaposition with Pablo Picasso's "Girl in Front of a Mirror", borrowed from New York, proclaimed the connection of West German painting to the international development of art.
This first work of art conceived situationally for a documenta is now on display again in Kassel. On the initiative of the Fritz Winter Foundation and the Bavarian State Painting Collections, the Museumslandschaft Hessen Kassel will reconstruct the artist's central contributions to the first three documenta exhibitions in 1955, 1959 and 1964 in the Neue Galerie from 13 November 2020 as part of the exhibition "Fritz Winter. documenta artist of the first hour".
The exhibition in the Neue Galerie will feature around 90 works of painting, graphic art and sculpture. It is based on the extensive holdings of the Museumslandschaft Hessen Kassel and the Fritz Winter Foundation, which has been housed at the Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen since its foundation in 1981. The exhibition is significantly supported by the Fritz-Winter-Haus, Ahlen, which is providing important loans.
Visitors will have the opportunity to rediscover a central protagonist of early documenta history, a painter who significantly expanded the language of non-objective art in Germany from the 1920s onwards.
Neue Galerie Kassel