GÜNTHER UECKER

The exhibition’s second floor illuminates Uecker’s recent series of nail reliefs from which thepresentation takes its name. Featuring bold graphite marks, eddies of white paint, and skeinsof nails, these canvases are among the artist’s most revealing and restrained, advancing hisexperimentation with the format and finding expression in our contemporary age. Uecker createdthe Shields during his continued pandemic isolation. Alone in the studio, he progressively workedon each composition, enacting a process of opening up and healing, and finding introspection andrelief. The more limited application of paint in these paintings, on both canvas and nails, results inpanels that are exposed, raw, and immediate, laying bare the artist’s own vulnerability. Uecker’s workdirectly reckons with social and environmental crises, channeling the emotional imprints of pain andgrief as well as spiritual fulfillment and joy. His act of hammering harkens back to his experience

as a teenager during the final years of the Second World War, when he helped to protect his familyhome from Russian soldiers by nailing planks to the windows as barricades. The artist envisionedthe dual aspects of a shield as he developed these nail paintings: armor that can serve as bothprotection and a representation of oneself, bearing a personal emblem or family crest.

Swabs (2022), comprising a grid of forty-two paintings on paper, connects the two floors of theexhibition. Created this year alongside Uecker’s nailed Shields, these paintings are characterisedby vertical strokes and atmospheric spirals of graphite intersected and obscured by currents ofpaint. The work’s title refers to the rapid process of collecting DNA and revealing essential elementsof oneself. Each mark here translates and elaborates elements of Uecker’s hammering process,integrating bodily traces into the painted surfaces. Where the depth of his nail works offers kineticchoreographies of light and shadow, in the present work, the artist achieves an equally resonanteffect through shallower interplays of transparency and opacity. The intense, spectral presence ofSwabs is exemplary of Uecker’s ability to conceive work that seems to transcend materiality itself.

Also on the first floor of the exhibition, visitors will encounter the two-part sculpture _Kubuskubus_(1967), which offers a distilled dialogue about materiality and perception. One part of the workcomprises a voluminous metal cube poised on top of another, held uncannily aloft by a layer ofdensely hammered nails. The second element likewise features two vertically arranged cubes; buthere, the upper cube consists of thousands of nails hammered into lead. Though the forms arethe same scale, they achieve radically different optical effects. Uecker once explained, ‘When Iuse nails my aim is to establish a structured pattern of relationships in order to set vibrations inmotion that disturb and irritate their geometric order. What is important to me is variability, whichis capable of revealing the beauty of movement to us.’ Kubuskubus references, in part, KazimirMalevich’s nonrepresentational painting Black Square (1913). With his sculpture, Uecker translatesMalevich’s square into four box-like elements, each presenting a unique relationship to light, surface,and gravity. Giving the structures a vertical orientation, he references the dimensions of the humanbody, creating a dialectic with the viewer.

In its totality, Kubuskubus draws the viewer’s attention to space—that of the viewer, the work,the gallery, but also the passages between the sculpture’s nails and between the two primarystructural elements—inviting a phenomenological consideration of the relationships amongobjects and contexts. Foregrounding the dynamics of matter in space, Kubuskubus, Swabs, andShields, exemplify Uecker’s ability to encourage viewers to experience new levels of perception andconsciousness through his art, offering moments of transcendence and hope.

About the Artist

Born in 1930 in Wendorf, Germany, Uecker studied at the Kunsthochschule Berlin Weissensee andKunstakademie in Düsseldorf, where he lives and works today. A central figure of Düsseldorf’spostwar Group Zero, Günther Uecker has for six decades developed his reliefs comprising dynamicarrangements of nails. After the group’s dissolution in 1966, Uecker’s work incorporated aspects ofconceptual and land art, and he began designing stage sets for operas. Among his public works areFrom Darkness to Light at the United Nations, Geneva (1978) and a Reflection and Prayer Room forthe Reichstag, Berlin (2000). In 2020, he embarked on his series Lichtbogen, minimalist paintingsof radiant blue-and-white arcs. Uecker’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at museumsworldwide. Retrospectives of his work have been organised by the Central House of Artists, Moscow(1988) and Kunsthalle München (1993), and he participated in Documenta (1964, 1968, 1977) and the1970 Venice Biennale. His work resides in such collections as the Art Institute of Chicago; Museum ofContemporary Art, Los Angeles; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Museum of Modern Art, NewYork; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; CentrePompidou, Paris; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and Tate Modern, London. Among his many honorsare the Pour le Mérite for Sciences and Arts (2000) and the Staatspreis des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen (2015).