Günther Uecker, Who Punctuated His Art With Nails, Dies at 95

New York Times

01-07-2025

As a member of the three-man German collective Zero Group, Günther Uecker helped revolutionize postwar European art. In the early 1960s, tired of the dark colors and personal gestures that had dominated the previous decade, he and his partners, Heinz Mack and Otto Piene, staged a number of international exhibitions filled with minimal paintings and sculptures that emphasized texture, movement and light.
His own most famous series, though, was inspired by a dictum from an earlier revolution.
'Coming from East Germany, where I had been educated about the Russian Revolution of 1917,' Mr. Uecker recalled in 2017 in Apollo magazine, 'I was thinking about Vladimir Mayakovsky's declaration that 'poetry is made with a hammer.''
In 1957, he hammered nails into the edges of a yellow monochrome painting so that they stuck out like spines or thorns. Those were the first of thousands more nails he would go on to hammer — into columns, wooden spheres, chairs, televisions and canvases painted white. Like other artists in the broader movement he spearheaded with Mr. Mack and Mr. Piene, Mr. Uecker wanted his materials, and the purity of a simple gesture, to speak for themselves.
Mr. Uecker's approach was rich with symbolic and philosophical resonance. It made visible the sustained, almost violent effort it takes to shape the world with one's hands, and the power of repetition to bring about complexity. Every nail rose from its surface in a rigid, invariant line, but together they also cast shadows, formed intricate patterns and stood at various angles. They even had room for the kind of expressive gestures Mr. Uecker and his colleagues had ostensibly rejected: In his 5-foot-square 'White Bird,' made in 1964, hundreds of nails driven into a white canvas resembled both a flock of starlings and the shadow of a single flying bird.
Mr. Uecker died on June 10 in Düsseldorf. His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by his son Jacob. He was 95.
Want all of The Times? Subscribe.