Lichtsäulen

Between 1933 and 1937 Fritz Winter worked on a series of pictures in which light formed the central theme. As a Bauhaus student he was strongly influenced by his teacher Paul Klee, who considered natural creation and human artistic creation to be analogous. Winter, however, quickly forged his own path within non-representational painting, emerging as one of the most important German representatives of abstract art.

Exemplary for this is his painting »Light Pillars«, which gives voice to the immaterial. The bodiless light is arranged into vertical pillars extending across a crystalline structure, bearing witness to the influence of the Cubists and Futurists. The structure’s transparent rectangles are superimposed on a dark background, forming translucent layers which are both dynamic and harmonious. But Winter’s light does not emanate from any specific source. Understood as a symbol of the godly and spiritual since antiquity, for the painter, it constitutes a medium of complete freedom and an almost mystical symbol: “the immateriality of light as a symbol of the absolute.”