Günther Uecker, an iconic artist of the postwar era who redefined abstraction not with paint but with nails hammed into his canvases, died on Tuesday at 95. His passing was announced by his New York gallery, Lévy Gorvy Dayan, which did not specify a cause of death. The German press agency dpa reported that he had been hospitalized in Düsseldorf.
Uecker was one of the main artists associated with ZERO, an avant-garde group that was founded in 1957 by Otto Piene and Heinz Mack. Uecker joined later on, in 1961, though he had already been exhibiting with the movement, which wound up extending far beyond Germany and came to include artists such as Yves Klein and Jean Tinguely. Uecker, however, was always one of its core members.
ZERO had the broad goal of returning art to its absolute basics, with Piene, Mack, and Uecker writing in their 1963 manifesto, “Zero is the beginning. Zero is round. Zero is turning.” Uecker’s contribution was abstractions produced by hammering nails into various surfaces, from canvases to lightboxes to TV sets and more.
He continued to use that formula well into his 90s, with Glenn Adamson writing in Frieze in 2019, “Whatever you are doing right now, there is a good chance that Günther Uecker is hammering.” Adamson reported that Uecker, then 90, was still working seven days a week, six hours a day, in the Düsseldorf studio he had held since 1987, the year he moved his workspace out of the one long shared with Gerhard Richter.
Many of Uecker’s nail works of the 1950s and ’60s did not look at all like paintings. He drove his nails through disks that rotated, chairs that could no longer be used by a sitter, and a mechanized tree trunk that spun around, causing the nails to clatter. Uecker created a sense of motion using the nails, which sometimes seemed to undulate because of how they were arranged. In later works inspired by deserts, Uecker hammed his nails into white canvases that, when seen beneath gallery lighting, had shadows that appeared to warp and turn. The works look a bit like the windswept deserts that Uecker said inspired him.
In an interview with Apollo, Uecker explained that his nails created patterns that were “like the marks you have from injuries … scars.”
Work by Günther Uecker.
Photo Dominic Lipinski/PA Images via Getty Images
Günther Uecker was born on March 13, 1930, in Wendorf, Germany. His father, a farmer, instilled in him the notion that “our purpose in life is to bring the fruit from the earth,” as Uecker put it in the Apollo interview. His childhood was altered by World War II, the atrocities of which he experienced firsthand: he recalled having to help Russian soldiers bury the dead bodies that washed ashore from downed German ships.
Once the war ended, the German Democratic Republic took over the Ueckers’ farmland, and the family suddenly became East Germans. Uecker himself trained as a propaganda artist, then left for Berlin in 1953 to attend art school for painting. Starting in 1955, he began attending the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf.
He began making his nail paintings in 1956. “Coming from East Germany, where I had been educated about the Russian Revolution of 1917,” he told Apollo, “I was thinking about Vladimir Mayakovsky’s declaration that ‘poetry is made with a hammer.’”
Uecker rose alongside Piene and Mack, who garnered acclaim for their three-artist showing paying homage to Lucio Fontana at the 1964 edition of Documenta, a closely watched exhibition held once every five years in Kassel, Germany. (It was the first of three Documentas that included Uecker.) The critical attention brought Uecker shows abroad, including an appearance in the famed 1965 Museum of Modern Art show “The Responsive Eye,” which helped pin down the Op art movement and focused on a range of works that enacted perceptual effects using kinetic objects and abstraction. But the fame gradually pushed Uecker away from the ZERO group, which formally dissolved in 1966.
Now spun off from the group, Uecker continued to make his own kind of music—sometimes literally. In 1968, at the Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, he made the noisy installation Terror Orchestra, for which he offered objects formed from vacuums and other everyday objects that created a cacophony of sounds. Then, in 1970, alongside Mack, he represented Germany at the Venice Biennale. From 1974 to 1995, he taught at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf.
Paintings by Günther Uecker at François Pinault’s Punta della Dogana museum in Venice in 2016.
Photo Barbara Zanon/Getty Images
He continued making explicitly political work. Starting in 1968, he disseminated his ideas via manifesto-like texts printed in a newspaper bearing his name. And during the ’90s, at the invitation of the Chinese government, he created a project called Letter to Beijing, for which he wrote the UN Declaration of Human Rights on 19 cloths; China ultimately declined to exhibit it.
Periodically, however, he also proved he could have a lighter touch. In 1998, he designed a prayer room for the Reichstag. It’s a spare space host to tall pieces of wood with stones pushed through them in allusion to Christ’s wounds. Wolfgang Thierse, former president of the Bundestag, once said of Uecker’s prayer room, “Obligations deriving from party membership recede into the background and awareness increases of the limits and hazards of political activity. Where could such a place be more appropriate than at the heart of our democracy, in Parliament?”
In the past decade and a half, with increased attention paid internationally to the ZERO group (which was memorably surveyed at the Guggenheim Museum in 2014), interest in Uecker’s work has run high. His works now sometimes sell for over $1 million, and his art can regularly be seen at blue-chip art fairs. Much of the reason for ZERO’s visibility was thanks to Uecker, Mack, and Piene, who in 2008 formed a foundation dedicated to the group. But Uecker seemed to not to mind whether deep-pocked dealers cared for his work.
“Don’t join the establishment,” he told Apollo.
