Günther Uecker, "Untitled (Weißes Bild)", 1959

After Heinz Mack and Otto Piene founded the magazine “ZERO” in 1958, they also gave the name to the well-known international avant-garde art movement. Günther Uecker joined the group in 1961, and is often referred to in the same breath as an artist at the heart of the movement that largely shaped post-war art in Germany. However, before joining the group, he had already started his signature works, the well-known nail pictures, at the end of the 1950s. Throughout the 1950s, Uecker examined philosophies whose main tenets advocated simplicity and purity, including Buddhism, Taoism, and Islam. His fascination with purification rites, such as the Gregorian chant, led him to engage in his own rituals of repetition, and he began hammering nails for extended periods of time.

Uecker’s art tends towards sculpture simply because of the way it is made. Objects such as canvas, wood, tables, chairs and pianos studded with nails produce something organic, spore-like and animated in their rhythmic structuring. By being studded with nails, in principle an aggressively destructive act, the object is deprived of its utilitarian function to become a symbolically condensed object for representation. In Untitled (Weißes Bild), the energy and dynamic are discernible which distinguish Uecker’s work. The creative process is almost palpable.