Nails and white paint on canbas on wood
Not recorded by Honisch any longer. Signed, dated, titled and with an arrow indicating the direction on verso. 90 x 90 cm (35,4 x 35,4 in)

PROVENANCE: Galerie van der Koelen, Mainz.

Günther Uecker was born in Wendorf, Mecklenburg on 13 March 1930. He began his artistic education in 1949 when he took up studies at Wismar. He then went to the art school in Berlin-Weißensee and in 1955 to Düsseldorf. Here Uecker studied under Otto Pankok at the Art Academy where he has also been teaching since 1974. He made his first nail pictures towards the end of the 1950s. Uecker met the group ZERO with the artists Heinz Mack and Otto Piene in 1960, artists who propagated a new beginning of art in opposition to the German Informel. He occupied himself with the medium of light, studied optical phenomena, series of structures and the realms of oscillation which actively integrate the viewer and enable him to influence the visual process by kinetic or manual interference. Uecker, Mack and Piene began working together in joint studios at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 1962 and installed a 'Salon de Lumière' at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Other 'light salons' followed in Krefeld and in Frankfurt. Since 1966, after the group ZERO dissolved and a last joint exhibition, Uecker increasingly used nails as an artistic means of expression - a material which, until today, stands in the centre of his oeuvre. At the beginning of the 1960s he began hammering nails into pieces of furniture, musical instruments and household objects, then he began combining nails with the theme of light, creating his series of light nails and kinetic nails and other works. Light and electricity continued to be one of the main subjects and natural materials such as sand and water were included in his installations, resulting in an interaction of the different elements to create a sensation of light, space, movement and time.

Uecker uses the form of the spiral several times in his oeuvre. The constant dynamic, the orderly motion continuously develops its effect. “The way I use nails as structural elements in my work, I do not want them to be perceived as nails. I want to attain an oscillation with this material and its order that will disturb their geometrical system and irritate them.“ (translation of quote after: Mack Piene Uecker, Kestner-Gesellschaft Hanover, catalog 7, year of exhibition 1964/65, p. 166). This intentional irritation is emphasized by the irregularly applied paint in this work.

Günther Uecker's oeuvre includes painting, object art, installations as well as stage designs and films. His origins explain his interest in the eastern European avant-garde of the 1920s and 1930s, he travels a lot, also with his students, and is likewise interested in Asian cultures and their ideas. His works can be seen in collections and large fairs in the West as well as the East. Uecker's artistic creativity reached a peak with the prayer room he designed from 1998 to 2000 for the Berlin Reichstag building. Günther Uecker lives and works in Düsseldorf. [EH].