Fritz Winter
Fritz Winter began his artistic career in 1927 at the Bauhaus in Dessau as a pupil of Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Josef Albers and Oskar Schlemmer. With his "pictorial theory of design" Paul Klee exerted a lasting influence on the young painter even after leaving the Bauhaus in 1930. Thus Fritz Winter tried to make art that is parallel to nature in order to fathom its inherent mystery. In 1931 Winter took up a teaching post at the Pedagogical Academy in Halle, but two years later, after the National Socialist seizure of power, he was banned from painting and was drafted into military service. After returning home from Russian war captivity, Fritz Winter became a founding member of the group "ZEN 49", which aligned its art theory with the European reception of Zen Buddhism and thus understood painting as "active meditation". Fritz Winter developed an independent, abstract style that reveals a close relationship to nature and that attempts to make visible the hidden, elementary forces and structures of nature.