The night touches the earth
Fritz Winter's cosmos of the 1930s and 1940s
09.10.2026 - 31.01.2026 ,
Sammlung Moderne Kunst in der Pinakothek der Moderne (Modern Art Collection at the Pinacotheca of the Modern)
- Museum café.
- Shop.
How do contemporary testimony and artistic abstraction go together in times of dictatorship and war? On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of his death, a central phase of Fritz Winter's work will be retold on the basis of the newly accessible estate. Trained by Klee and Kandinsky at the Bauhaus in Dessau, Winter no longer found any exhibition opportunities in Germany from 1933 onwards. From 1937, his art was considered degenerate. He experienced the Second World War as a soldier on the Eastern Front, primarily in Romania and the Ukraine. In his largely non-representational art, which was orientated towards natural phenomena, he found powerful and touching forms of expression for the "fate of the times". In increasing artistic isolation, he created cell and star images, crystallisations and expressive surreal landscapes. He processed his experiences as a soldier in hundreds of drawings, in which he also dealt with the human machinery of extermination and the destruction of living spaces. In 1944, he created the famous group of works entitled "Driving Forces of the Earth" - a celebration of the elementary forces and laws of nature, which was read as a metaphor for overcoming National Socialism.
Last edited on 11.11.2025
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