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Lot Essay
‘When I use nails … my aim is to establish a structured pattern of relationships … in order to set vibrations in motion that disturb and irritate their geometric order. What is important to me is variability, which is capable of revealing the beauty of movement to us’
GUNTHER UECKER
‘My works acquire their reality through light ... their intensity is changeable due to the light impinging on them which, from the viewer’s standpoint is variable’
GUNTHER UECKER
Created in 1965, during the height of Günther Uecker’s involvement with the avant-garde Zero group, Gegenläufige Struktur (Opposed Structure) transforms the humble nail into a vehicle for the poetics of space, light, time and motion. This intimately scaled construction straddles the mediums of painting and sculpture and invites the play of light and shadow over its bristling monochrome surface. As the work’s title implies, the nails driven into the wood-backed canvas are laid down in opposing directions so that they converge in the centre in a critical mass. The forms of the white-painted nails disappear into the white ground but their cast shadows offer a seductive optical experience as they appear to shift and change with the viewer’s position and variable lighting conditions. The angles of the nails and the attendant light effects elicit a sense of visual dynamism when in fact the surface maintains a physical stasis; it is the beholder’s own motions and sensory perceptions that activates the work. The significance of this emphasis on the perceptual experience of art would see Uecker’s work included in The Responsive Eye, the hugely successful exhibition identified with the birth of the Op Art movement that took place at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1965.
Yet the materiality of works like Gegenläufige Struktur indicate that Uecker’s artistic concerns reached beyond mere optics. Like his Zero colleagues, Uecker wanted to reinvent the forms and language of art to usher in a new era, a ‘zero-hour’, that would replace the shock and pessimism of the immediate postwar years. Believing all illusions in painting were lies and all idealisms were dangerous seductions, he looked to the banalities of everyday life and rejected the soul-searching painterly abstraction that had dominated the 1950s. He instead developed a practice that addresses the world objectively and is embedded in the present. The structure of Uecker’s nail-embedded works, which protrude into the viewer’s domain, are intended to be both an invitation and a challenge as he seeks to bring his audience closer to a sense of reality and our place within the universe. His ‘nail fields’, as he calls them, are ‘an articulation of transitory time, like sundials which describe, through the shadows, that we are in constant motion within a cosmic context’ (Louisiana Channel, 2017, Günther Uecker Interview: Poetry Made with a Hammer. Retrieved from www.channel.louisiana.dk).
Uecker looked to the music of silence by John Cage and the concept of the void central to Eastern religions to develop a kind of tabula rasa that signalled his desire for a new beginning. The virgin white monochrome was not a space for representation or expression, but a pure and liberated zone in which the ‘image’ and concept was made physically and vitally concrete. Uecker’s signature use of the nail, which first appeared in his work in 1957, removes the subjective dimension of the artwork’s creation, but it is still loaded with personal, poetic and political significance. The labour involved in hammering harks back to Uecker’s rural upbringing in Wendorf, Germany, and the heavily industrialised Ruhr region where he moved to in 1955. The nail paintings also owe their conceptual and spiritual foundation to the Constructivist art of Kasimir Malevich and his pupil Wladyslaw Strzeminski, as well as the statement, often attributed to the Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, that ‘Art is not a mirror held up to society, but a hammer with which to shape it’. Gegenläufige Struktur is, then, a confluence of conceptual abstraction, performative action and utopian ideals. But it is above all, in Uecker’s words, a ‘visionary form of purity, beauty, and stillness’ (G. Uecker, quoted in D. Honisch, Uecker, New York 1983, p. 14).
GUNTHER UECKER
‘My works acquire their reality through light ... their intensity is changeable due to the light impinging on them which, from the viewer’s standpoint is variable’
GUNTHER UECKER
Created in 1965, during the height of Günther Uecker’s involvement with the avant-garde Zero group, Gegenläufige Struktur (Opposed Structure) transforms the humble nail into a vehicle for the poetics of space, light, time and motion. This intimately scaled construction straddles the mediums of painting and sculpture and invites the play of light and shadow over its bristling monochrome surface. As the work’s title implies, the nails driven into the wood-backed canvas are laid down in opposing directions so that they converge in the centre in a critical mass. The forms of the white-painted nails disappear into the white ground but their cast shadows offer a seductive optical experience as they appear to shift and change with the viewer’s position and variable lighting conditions. The angles of the nails and the attendant light effects elicit a sense of visual dynamism when in fact the surface maintains a physical stasis; it is the beholder’s own motions and sensory perceptions that activates the work. The significance of this emphasis on the perceptual experience of art would see Uecker’s work included in The Responsive Eye, the hugely successful exhibition identified with the birth of the Op Art movement that took place at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1965.
Yet the materiality of works like Gegenläufige Struktur indicate that Uecker’s artistic concerns reached beyond mere optics. Like his Zero colleagues, Uecker wanted to reinvent the forms and language of art to usher in a new era, a ‘zero-hour’, that would replace the shock and pessimism of the immediate postwar years. Believing all illusions in painting were lies and all idealisms were dangerous seductions, he looked to the banalities of everyday life and rejected the soul-searching painterly abstraction that had dominated the 1950s. He instead developed a practice that addresses the world objectively and is embedded in the present. The structure of Uecker’s nail-embedded works, which protrude into the viewer’s domain, are intended to be both an invitation and a challenge as he seeks to bring his audience closer to a sense of reality and our place within the universe. His ‘nail fields’, as he calls them, are ‘an articulation of transitory time, like sundials which describe, through the shadows, that we are in constant motion within a cosmic context’ (Louisiana Channel, 2017, Günther Uecker Interview: Poetry Made with a Hammer. Retrieved from www.channel.louisiana.dk).
Uecker looked to the music of silence by John Cage and the concept of the void central to Eastern religions to develop a kind of tabula rasa that signalled his desire for a new beginning. The virgin white monochrome was not a space for representation or expression, but a pure and liberated zone in which the ‘image’ and concept was made physically and vitally concrete. Uecker’s signature use of the nail, which first appeared in his work in 1957, removes the subjective dimension of the artwork’s creation, but it is still loaded with personal, poetic and political significance. The labour involved in hammering harks back to Uecker’s rural upbringing in Wendorf, Germany, and the heavily industrialised Ruhr region where he moved to in 1955. The nail paintings also owe their conceptual and spiritual foundation to the Constructivist art of Kasimir Malevich and his pupil Wladyslaw Strzeminski, as well as the statement, often attributed to the Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, that ‘Art is not a mirror held up to society, but a hammer with which to shape it’. Gegenläufige Struktur is, then, a confluence of conceptual abstraction, performative action and utopian ideals. But it is above all, in Uecker’s words, a ‘visionary form of purity, beauty, and stillness’ (G. Uecker, quoted in D. Honisch, Uecker, New York 1983, p. 14).