Günther Uecker, who punctuated his art with nails, dies at 95

Boston Globe

07-07-2025

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 Mack and Piene, Mr. Uecker wanted his materials, and the purity of a simple gesture, to speak for themselves.
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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.
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Mr. Uecker died June 10 in Düsseldorf. His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by his son Jacob. He was 95.
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In addition to his son, he is survived by his wife, Christine Uecker, who runs the Uecker Archive with Jacob; his children Marcel Uecker-Hardung and Laura Uecker, from a previous marriage; and his sister Rotraut Moquay-Klein, an artist. Another sister, Edita Mathais, died in 1987.
Nails were not Mr. Uecker's only medium. He covered chairs with string; built kinetic installations with motors and sand; designed sets; made films; staged exhibitions and what he called performance-art 'actions' all over the world; and painted the old-fashioned way, with canvas and paint.
He also designed a meditation room for Germany's lower house of Parliament in Berlin, as well as soaring blue windows that were recently installed in Schwerin Cathedral, in the northern Germany city its named after. But for six decades nails remained his signature. Writing for Frieze in 2019, when Mr. Uecker was nearly 90, curator Glenn Adamson said, 'Whatever you are doing right now, there is a good chance that Günther Uecker is hammering.'
After the death in 1962 of artist Yves Klein, his friend and brother-in-law, Mr. Uecker even found consolation in the practice.
'It was a way to process my emotions,' he said of his piece 'Hommage à Yves Klein' in a 2024 interview. 'I punched a canvas and the wooden boards behind it until my hands started bleeding. And then I stretched the canvas and splashed white paint onto it, because it seemed too literal. At the center of the work is my blood, resulting from the pain I felt over the fact that Yves Klein had fallen into the sky.'
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Günther Uecker (pronounced GOON-ter OO-eck-er) was born March 13, 1930, in Wendorf, in northern Germany, the oldest child of Charlotte (Roeglin) and Walter Uecker, an engineer and mechanic. His parents later owned a farm in Wustrow, on the Baltic Sea.
'The inspiration for my work comes from nature,' Mr. Uecker told Matthew Wilcox for Apollo magazine in 2017. 'My father was a farmer, and I still believe our purpose in life is to bring the fruit from the earth.'
In the same interview, he recalled the commingled smells of soil, animals, and airplane production during World War II, and being forced by Russian soldiers to bury corpses that had washed ashore from a downed prison boat.
In 1953, Mr. Uecker slipped out of what had become the Communist-controlled German Democratic Republic into West Berlin. After studying art there while waiting to be processed as a refugee, he made his way to Düsseldorf and enrolled at the Kunstakademie, where his classmates included Joseph Beuys and Günter Grass.
Zero Group began in Düsseldorf in the late 1950s when Piene and Mack began staging one-night studio exhibitions. They later befriended Klein, who joined them for some shows, and named their collective Zero Group, evoking the final tense, expectant moment of a rocket-ship countdown. Mr. Uecker was one of 45 artists to participate in the duo's seventh show, 'The Red Picture,' in April 1958; it was accompanied by the first of three issues of a Zero Group magazine.
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He was soon inducted as the third core member of the group.
A 1963 poem written jointly by Piene, Mack, and Mr. Uecker, published in connection with an exhibition at Galerie Diogenes in Berlin, expressed their shared ideas about their guiding symbol in evocative terms, if not very specific ones. 'Zero is silence. Zero is the beginning. Zero is round. Zero spins,' the poem begins, ultimately concluding, 'Zero is Zero.'
Mr. Uecker showed work at Documenta 3, the contemporary art exhibition in Kassell, in 1964, both alone and, after a special appeal to the organizer, with Piene and Mack as part of Zero Group. That same year, the trio made their American institutional debut at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia and their commercial debut at the Howard Wise Gallery in Manhattan. In 1965, Mr. Uecker was included in the group exhibition 'The Responsive Eye' at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
By 1966, however, the group could no longer agree on a direction and decided to disband. Their final show, in Bonn, Germany, included Mr. Uecker's 'New York Dancer I,' in which a white cloth studded with clattering nails hung from a revolving post.
In subsequent years, he represented Germany at the 1970 Venice Biennale, won a number of German art prizes and exhibited widely. He also taught for more than 20 years at the Kunstakademie.
In a certain sense, his whole career was an extended expression of the special kind of possibility available to artists of his generation.
'When we looked at our parents and the neighbors,' he explained, 'we thought they were all murderers, they had been responsible for the war. Young people then were very free. We felt we could do it all.'
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