Günther Uecker, a German artist of the postwar era who redefined abstraction with nails hammed into his canvases, died on Tuesday at 95. His passing was announced by his New York gallery, Lévy Gorvy Dayan.
Günther Uecker was born in Wendorf in 1930. During his time at the Düsseldorf Art Academy, from 1955 to 1957, he initially occupied himself with the art of socialist realism and abstract art. The themes of movement and interplay of light and shadow, which reveal themselves in his works, became increasingly important to him, when Uecker joined the artist group »ZERO«, founded by Otto Piene and Heinz Mack in 1961, where he engaged with kinetic light art.
Although it is an everyday object that is usually kept hidden, the nail became an important element in the work of German artist Günther Uecker. Through nails, he evoked a play with light and shadow, creating an optical illusion of movement.
The artist's first nail pictures were created towards the end of the 1950s and stemmed from an earlier trauma. During the War, Uecker boarded up the windows of his family home with wooden planks to protect them from possible attacks. The aggressive act of hammering nails into planks to keep the inside of the house sheltered inspired Uecker to tell the story of his — and the world’s — trauma.
For Uecker, art is like the traces of wounds ploughed into the field. In this, the nail symbolises the paradox of ‘healing by hurting’. The spatial reality created by the nails is meant to overcome the personal gesture and to generate the necessary conditions for freedom. Later in his oeuvre, the nail became more of a meditative object, a focal point to concentrate on.
Günther Uecker: "The progress of the shadow that forms is also connected with the feeling that as each day passes one yields to the embrace of night until the next morning and that terrible moment when I, as an individual, cast a shadow of my own and find myself alone in the universe. It was that same existential terror that prompted me to make works that render visible the never-ending movement that is only halted for the short moment when a nail is hit."
Anna Melnykova, "Palace of Labor (palats praci), architector I. Pretro, 1916", shot with analog Canon camera, 35 mm Fuji film in March 2022.
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