Günther Uecker, an iconic artist of the post-war era, died at the age of 95 on Tuesday, instead of redefining the abstraction with paint, hammering nails into his canvas. His death was announced by his New York gallery, Lévy Gorvy Dayan, who did not specify a cause of death. German news agency DPA reported that he had been hospitalized in Düsseldorf.
Uecker is one of the leading artists of the avant-garde group Zero, founded in 1957 with Otto Piene and Heinz Mack. Uecker later joined in 1961, although he had already exhibited with the sport, which went far beyond Germany and included artists such as Yves Klein and Jean Tinguely. However, Uk has always been one of its core members.
Zero’s goal is to return art to its absolute basics, and Piene, Mack and Uecker wrote in their 1963 manifesto: “Zero is the beginning. Zero is the circle. Uecker’s contribution is an abstraction produced by hammering nails into various surfaces, from canvases to light boxes to televisions and more.
In the 90s, he continued to use the formula, wrote Glenn Adamson frize In 2019, “regardless of what you’re doing now, Günther Uecker has a great chance to hammer.” Adamson reported that Uecker, 90, was still working seven days a week for six hours a week, working at Düsseldorf Studio since 1987, and that year he moved his workspace out of the workspace he had long shared with Gerhard Richter.
Many of Uecker’s nail works in the 1950s and 1960s looked unpainted. He drove his nails to a rotating disc, a chair that the babysitter could not use, and a rotating mechanical trunk, causing his nails to be patted. Uecker uses nails to create a sense of sportiness that sometimes seems to rise and fall due to the way they are arranged. In later desert-inspired works, Uecker hammers his nails into a white canvas, and their shadows seem to be bent and twisting when seen in gallery lighting. These works look a bit like what Uk calls the windy desert, which inspired him.
In an interview ApolloUecker explained, his nails create a pattern of “like the mark you get hurt…scars.”
GüntherUecker’s work.
Photos Dominic Lipinski/PA Images by Getty Images
Günther Uecker was born on March 13, 1930 in Windorf, Germany. His father, a farmer, instilled in him the idea that “our purpose of life is to bring fruit from the earth” Uecker Put it in Apollo interview. During World War II, his childhood changed, and he experienced his atrocities firsthand: he recalled the need to help Russian soldiers bury bodies that rushed ashore from the fallen German ship.
After the war, the German Democratic Republic took over Ux’s farmland and the family suddenly became East Germans. Uk himself received training as a propaganda artist and then went to Berlin to attend art school in 1953 to paint. Since 1955, he has participated in Kunstakademie Düsseldorf.
He began making nail paintings in 1956. “From East Germany, where I was educated in the Russian Revolution of 1917,” he told Apollo“I am considering Vladimir Mayakovsky’s statement ‘The poem is made of hammers.’”
Uecker Rose, along with Piene and Mack, paid tribute to Lucio Fontana on the 1964 edition of Documenta and to Lucio Fontana on the 1964 Documenta, a closely watched exhibition in Kassel, Germany. (This is the first of three literatures, including Uecker.) A key concern has led to Uecker’s appearance abroad, including in the famous 1965 Museum of Modern Art “Reactive Eyes”, which helped to fix the OP Art movement on a series of works that use dynamic objects and abstractions to formulate perceptual effects. But fame gradually moved Uecker from the zero group that was officially disbanded in 1966.
Now, Uecker stands out from the group and continues to create his own music – sometimes literally. In 1968, at Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, he made noisy installations Horror OrchestraTo this end, he provides objects formed by vacuums and other everyday objects that produce a harsh sound. Then, in 1970, he joined Mack in Germany for the Venice Biennale. From 1974 to 1995, he taught at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf.
In 2016, Günther Uecker paintings from the Punta Della Dogana Museum of François Pinault were painted in 2016.
Photos by Barbara Zanon/Getty Images
He continued to carry out clear political work. From 1968, he spread his ideas through manifesto-like texts printed in newspapers named after him. In the 1990s, at the invitation of the Chinese government, he created a project called Letter to Beijingfor this, he wrote 19 pieces from the UN Declaration of Human Rights; China ultimately refused to display it.
However, he also regularly proves that he might be easier. In 1998, he designed a prayer room for the Capitol. This is a backup space host, pushing stones onto Christ’s wounds, pushing stones into them. Former federal president Wolfgang Thierse once spoke about the prayer room in Uecker, “The obligations derived from party membership are returned to the background, and awareness of the limits and harms of political activities is increased. In the heart of our democracy, this place may be more suitable for the core of our democracy?”
Over the past decade and a half, attention has been growing (a memorable survey at the Guggenheim Museum in 2014), and interest in Uecker’s work is high. Now, his work is sometimes sold for over $1 million, and his art can be seen regularly at Blue Chip Art Fairs. Many of the reasons for zero visibility are attributed to Uecker, Mack and Piene, who set up a foundation specifically for the group in 2008. But Uk doesn’t seem to mind whether the deep dealer takes care of his job.
“Don’t join the agency,” he told Apollo.
