Bold, radical, and revolutionary: Alongside Piero Manzoni and Lucio Fontana, Günther Uecker was one of the pioneers of the European avant-garde movement in the early 1960s. It was the negation of painting that brought Uecker's famous nail paintings closer to the work of his European peers at the time. Like Fontana with his famous pierced canvases, the “Concetti Spaziali,” they pushed the boundaries of traditional panel painting. Around 1956/57, Uecker described his reduced, novel, and groundbreaking artistic concept in a way that made it seem like a kind of development of Fontana’s early “Concetti Spaziali,” the famous “Bucchi” (“Holes”): “Where two lines meet, there is a point; that’s where I put a nail... I determine the point...the shadow of the nail represents a new line....the movement of the shadow becomes the perception of time." In 1961, the year this work was created, Uecker joined the avant-garde group ZERO, founded by Otto Piene and Heinz Mack a few years earlier. These young, progressive artists collectively describe their radical new beginning in their 1963 “ZERO” manifesto with words that read almost like a description of the present work: “Zero is silence. Zero is the beginning. Zero is round. Zero rotates. Zero is the moon.” Silver-gray, round, and rotating, Uecker’s “Taktile Struktur Rotierend” exudes an aesthetically reduced aura that still captivates today’s observers. Like a distant planet, the monochromatic surface of the nail disc—brought to life by the play of light and shadow—seems to float against a dark background that recedes into mysterious depth. Depending on the rotation, angle, and shadow cast by the movably mounted nail necks extending into the space, it creates a whole new visual experience that, despite its minimalism, seems to offer endless variations.

In historical terms, we are talking about the period after the unspeakable horrors of World War II, the moment when Germany had begun to rise from the rubble and face up to its historical guilt. At this pivotal moment, this young, avant-garde group of German artists was also promoting a radically purified, artistic new beginning on an aesthetic level. Uecker’s revolutionary work, in particular, set a clear and, to this day, unmistakable mark in this regard: monochromatic, three-dimensional, and powerfully nailed, Uecker created a completely unprecedented visual experience in his early nail pictures, which emerged in the early 1960s. The light and the shadows cast by the nail heads—which shift depending on the viewer’s vantage point—create an interactive aesthetic experience that extends from the wall into the room, thereby achieving an intensely sensory connection between art and space. At the same time, this artistic approach was also adopted by various other avant-garde artists across Europe, primarily in Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands: Manzoni’s “Achromes,” which extends the boundaries of the canvas into space, and Lucio Fontana’s famous “Concetti spaziali” are among the best-known positions of this aesthetically reduced movement. Like Uecker’s famous nail paintings, they also pushed the boundaries of classic panel painting and count among the most prominent negations of traditional painting in postwar European art. Uecker had just graduated from the Düsseldorf Academy and was in his early thirties when he created his first nail paintings and nail objects, which would henceforth become the international hallmark of his oeuvre. Our “Taktile Struktur Rotierend” is not only an early but also an outstanding example of this groundbreaking artistic work. Along with the slightly smaller composition “Taktile Struktur Rotierend,” also created in 1961 and now in the Guggenheim Collection in Venice, only one other comparable work of this type is known. Here, too, Uecker mounted a rotating disc with freely moving, long nail shafts in front of a rectangular painting surface. In addition to the gently shimmering color scheme in metallic silver-gray—extremely rare in Uecker’s oeuvre—it is also the extraordinary arrangement of the nails that earns these two works a prominent place in Uecker’s oeuvre: It is not the nail heads, but the arrow-like tips of the long, freely movable nail shafts that jut out toward viewers in these two unique nail paintings. Uecker’s nails seem to come alive, almost like a dense bundle of Mikado sticks, held mid-throw and just about to spread out across the surface from its center. And yet, it is a particularly quiet, almost cosmic-meditative aura that distinguishes these two outstanding creations in a special way.
In 1961, Günther Uecker also participated in the legendary exhibition “ZERO. Edition, Exposition, Demonstration” at Alfred Schmela’s famous avant-garde gallery in Düsseldorf. And as early as 1962, one year after the creation of this work, Uecker’s nail pictures were presented alongside works by Fontana and Manzoni in the exhibition “Nul 62” at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, a show devoted to the radical new beginning of the European avant-garde. [JS]