Material nails, white colour on canvas on wood
Dimensions 40 × 30 × 9 cm
Place of Creation Düsseldorf
Price Available upon inquiry
Status Vetted

About the Work

A seminal figure of his work, the nail, is an elementary particle that infuses Günther Uecker's creations with a sense of movement in space, light and time. His repeatedly pummeled sculptural paintings are reminiscent of Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray's Elevage de poussières, created in 1920, in which a discrete element set in motion dissolves into a spectral world. Akin to a graceful constellation, of selected shadows his works are adorned as each nail, still and silent as a sundial, dons a sliver of time.

It was in 1951 that the artist discovered abstract art while visiting West Berlin. Ten years later, he joined ZERO with Heinz Mack and Otto Piene who wrote the manifesto in Der Neue Idealismus: "ZERO is silence, ZERO is beginning, ZERO is round, ZERO spins..." are the most striking words. With his brother-in-law Yves Klein, he shared a taste for the monochrome and the primacy of the mind over the hand. Virginal and absolute, his works are coated in white, in a vibrant tribute to Malevitch. "White can be perceived as a prayer, the words of spiritual experience," says the painter, who has always been fascinated by Eastern philosophies. By summoning the "zero degree of art", Günther Uecker gradually takes us towards an extrasensory perception where the secret space of the painting is revealed to our meditation."

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Provenance

This work is registered in the Uecker Archive under the number GU.94.035 and is earmarked for inclusion in the Uecker catalog raisonné currently being compiled.

Galerie Löhrl, Mönchengaldbach
Private collection

Literature

Comparable literature:
Dieter Honisch, Uecker, Stuttgart 1983

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