. Nails and gray paint on canvas and wood
Signed, dated, titled and with arrow indicating the direction on verso. 40 x 40 cm (15,7 x 15,7 in)

We are grateful to Mr. and Mrs. Prof. Günther Uecker for their expert advice.

PROVENANCE: Galerie Reckermann, Cologne (with stamp on verso).
Borzo, Amsterdam.
Adler & Conkright Fine Art, New York (with label on verso).
Haunch of Venison, New York (with label on verso).
Private collection USA.

LITERATURE: Dieter Honisch, Uecker Grenzverhältnisse, Erker Verlag, St. Gallen 1985, illu. p. 16.

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 Kunstakademie 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 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 center 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.

"Working is something like an unconscious act for me. I do not reflect on what I am doing, but I become more and more obsessed until I reach a state that allows me to transfer what makes me so obsessed to a field of nails. At first it is a dialog, then a structuring, followed by an expressive palaver, until I finally say 'That’s it, don’t touch'." (translation of quote after: Tagesspiegel, 13 April 2008, no. 19873, page S 1). Uecker‘s nail pictures transform the violence of their process of creation to beauty. Made of a massive material, they appear weightless, calm and yet full of motion, as the play of light and shade of the dense entanglement of nail heads changes according to the viewer’s position. In creation and effect Uecker‘s powerful - poetic works seem to express apparent contrasts, action and contemplation merge, calmness and motion form a fascinating unity of a quiet beauty.

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, but he is likewise interested in Asian cultures and their ideas. His works are shown in various German museums and collections. Uecker's artistic creativity reached a peak in 2000 in the prayer room he designed for the Berlin Reichstag building. Günther Uecker teaches, lives and works in Düsseldorf. [JS].