Born in Altenbögge (Westphalia) in 1905, the painter (deceased 1976) is considered one of the most important German painters of international modern art due to his multi-layered work and extensive creative power. As a student of Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Josef Albers and Oskar Schlemmer, Winter achieved increasing independence in his artistic work. Even during his studies at the State Bauhaus in Dessau from 1927 to 1930, he distanced himself from its principles and criticized the subordinate position that painting held at the Bauhaus.

Inspired by the teachings of Kandinsky and Klee as well as his close friendship with Naum Gabo and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Winter's works from the 1930s show a free preoccupation with artistic means, detached from the Bauhaus ideals, which he experimented with using a diverse formal language. In 1949, he co-founded the Munich artists' group ZEN 49, which saw itself in the tradition of the Blaue Reiter and manifested itself in a pictorial representation of a world view that emphasized the spiritual. Already during the Second World War, Winter arrived at an abstract painting characterized by semi-organic forms and black latticework interwoven against a mostly light background, which made him one of the main pioneers of abstraction in Europe.