Nails. Thousands of completely normal nails, each one driven into a wooden board covered with linen. Some straight, some slanted, but none hammered in all the way. Günther Uecker has finished one of these nail reliefs every year for over half a century. They've made him famous in Germany and beyond. Not just screens, but also sewing machines, chairs, record players and grand pianos have borne the brunt of those little shafts of steel. Hardly any other artist has equally dedicated his work to the craft of simple physical labor.
Hammering nails into backdrops and objects with force and precision, Günther Uecker creates reliefs that he terms "nail fields" and that achieve their full effect in the play of light and shadow.
A life of war and peace
Born in the of town of Wendorf near Schwerin in northeastern Germany on March 13, 1930, Günther Uecker found himself boarding up doors and windows of his family house at age 15 in an effort to protect his mother and sister from the Russian army at war's end. It was the beginning of a life-long preoccupation with hammers and nails.
Post-World War II, he studied pictorial arts from 1949 until 1953 in Wismar, then in East Germany. In 1955 he fled to West Berlin and eventually found himself at the Art Academy in Düsseldorf, studying under Professor Otto Pankok from 1955-57.
During his studies he encountered the artists Heinz Mack and Otto Piene and joined their artists' conglomerate named ZERO in 1961. Together they represented a Zero Hour of art untouched by the horrors of the Second World War, marking a new beginning in art history.
Timeless art, nailed and painted
The avant-garde artists' group made waves far beyond Germany and their time. ZERO's ideas have undergone a renaissance in the new millennium, with ZERO retrospectives staged regularly worldwide since 2004. The Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin dedicated a big exhibition to ZERO in March 2015.
Back in 1966, no one could have anticipated the group's future popularity. It dissolved soon afterwards, and the artists went their separate ways.
Meanwhile, Günther Uecker's abstract art has been shown in over 60 countries and frequently been considered pioneering. In 2012 he became the first Western artist to be exhibited in the Iranian capital Tehran since the 1979 revolution. In 2007 came an exhibition in Beijing originally scheduled for 1994. On invitation from the Chinese government, Uecker had prepared the conceptual artwork Letter to Beijing.