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拍品专文
‘Art is not restricted to the surface of a picture’ – G. Uecker
Poetischer Reihe Sylt (1976), whose title translates roughly as ‘poetic series,’ is an exquisite distillation of Günther Uecker’s conceptual synthesis of poetry and process in his nail paintings. One of only four paintings to have nails flowing over the vertical edge of the canvas, this work is especially rare within the artist’s oeuvre. The rhythmic arrangement of nails blooms gracefully up the right hand side of the spare, white canvas, epitomising the ideals of the Zero movement, whom Uecker had joined in 1961. Starting from a theoretical blank slate, the Zero artists proposed to create art anew as a pure and untrammelled zone of primary existence, offering fresh opportunities for intellectual and spiritual communication. In the present work, the inflorescence of nails captures Uecker’s quest to express a purity of movement and form: the artist wrote that ‘[t]he white objects should be seen as states of extreme intensity kept in constant flux by the reflection of light. What is important to me is variability, which is capable of revealing the beauty of movement to us’ (G. Uecker, 1961, quoted in Günther Uecker: Twenty Chapters, exh. cat. Hatje Cantz, Berlin 2006, p. 34).
Far from blank or taciturn, Uecker’s monochrome ode to poetic motion is invitingly tactile, his signature nails becoming an appealing articulation of light and space. Their placement at the edge of the canvas is also a tantalising recollection of their escape from the picture plane, a practice that Uecker began in the mid-sixties. ‘By setting nails around the boundaries of pictures, structures that fill the field of a picture are driven to spread over the frame, over the walls, over furniture and other objects that surround us every day. Art invades the everyday world we live in … artistic expression expands and becomes a flood’ (G. Uecker, 1961, quoted in Günther Uecker: Twenty Chapters, exh. cat. Hatje Cantz, Berlin 2006, p. 66). Delicate and dynamic, Poetischer Reihe Sylt displays Uecker’s command of simple materials in a refined vision that bristles with lyrical power.
Poetischer Reihe Sylt (1976), whose title translates roughly as ‘poetic series,’ is an exquisite distillation of Günther Uecker’s conceptual synthesis of poetry and process in his nail paintings. One of only four paintings to have nails flowing over the vertical edge of the canvas, this work is especially rare within the artist’s oeuvre. The rhythmic arrangement of nails blooms gracefully up the right hand side of the spare, white canvas, epitomising the ideals of the Zero movement, whom Uecker had joined in 1961. Starting from a theoretical blank slate, the Zero artists proposed to create art anew as a pure and untrammelled zone of primary existence, offering fresh opportunities for intellectual and spiritual communication. In the present work, the inflorescence of nails captures Uecker’s quest to express a purity of movement and form: the artist wrote that ‘[t]he white objects should be seen as states of extreme intensity kept in constant flux by the reflection of light. What is important to me is variability, which is capable of revealing the beauty of movement to us’ (G. Uecker, 1961, quoted in Günther Uecker: Twenty Chapters, exh. cat. Hatje Cantz, Berlin 2006, p. 34).
Far from blank or taciturn, Uecker’s monochrome ode to poetic motion is invitingly tactile, his signature nails becoming an appealing articulation of light and space. Their placement at the edge of the canvas is also a tantalising recollection of their escape from the picture plane, a practice that Uecker began in the mid-sixties. ‘By setting nails around the boundaries of pictures, structures that fill the field of a picture are driven to spread over the frame, over the walls, over furniture and other objects that surround us every day. Art invades the everyday world we live in … artistic expression expands and becomes a flood’ (G. Uecker, 1961, quoted in Günther Uecker: Twenty Chapters, exh. cat. Hatje Cantz, Berlin 2006, p. 66). Delicate and dynamic, Poetischer Reihe Sylt displays Uecker’s command of simple materials in a refined vision that bristles with lyrical power.