Günther Uecker

Günther Uecker is the co-founder of ZERO, a German avant-garde created in 1958. Together with Heinz Mack and Otto Piene, Uecker felt the urge to react against the subjectivity dominating the art world at that time. They believed contemporary art had become incapable of providing a right answer to the disasters and trauma of the World War and Germany’s complicit role in it. ZERO wished to make tabula rasa and start anew by concentrating on pure abstraction and working mostly with natural materials like light, wind, movement, and fire, etc., in order to eliminate subjectivity from art and to merge art and nature.

In his work, Günther Uecker writes poetry with nails. Despite its inherent connotations and use as an everyday household tool, the nail is an emotionally charged object for Uecker. Growing up in East Germany during World War II, he experienced by many traumatic moments that later influenced his artistic practices and the way he faced life.

During the war, he blinded the windows of the family’s entire house with wooden planks in order to protect his two sisters and mother from possible attacks. This duality—attacking the house in order to save it—made a strong impression on the young artist, who was afraid he might never see this house, his home, again. The aggressive, yet necessary act of hammering nails into planks to keep the inside of the house sheltered from the outside world, inspired Uecker to tell the story of his—and the world’s—trauma through the language of nails. The paradoxical meaning corresponded strongly to how he had learned to see the world and man’s place in it.

The nail symbolises the paradox of “healing by hurting”. In daily life, the nail’s force is dual. It’s used to heal, hurt, mend, break, strengthen, crack, hold, damage, construct, and destroy. Uecker was not the first to understand and use the paradoxical character of the nail. In cultural history, we find it to be a recurrent tool used in rituals. His use of the nail does not only refer to his personal trauma, but is also charged with the anthropological history of this object.

Probably one of the clearest examples of its ritual use is found in Christianity. The nail is one of the instruments of the Passion of Christ, used to crucify the Son of God. Nails were hammered into Christ’s hands and feet, leaving wounds that would forever remind people of Christ’s suffering. For Uecker, who is much inspired by religion, a work of art carries the same metaphoric meaning and power as Christ’s wounds inflicted by nails. A wound makes us aware of the origin of pain and suffering, of its inevitability in the course of life, as well as an almost grim premise for growth. A wound also comforts, because at the same time it awakens the empathic desire to heal. In other words: in order to heal, one needs to be confronted with the wounds.

The paradox of the nail is also recognized in African culture. It is, for instance, the main element of the “nkondi” or nail fetish, made by the Kongo people of West Central Africa. Nkondi derives from the verb, –konda, meaning “to hunt”; they’re used to hunt down and eliminate evil, and also have the power to heal. The village’s “nganga”, or shamans, charge them with spiritual power and sculpt these often human- or animal-shaped fetishes. By hammering nails into the figures, the spirits inside are violently awakened. They’re enraged and full of energy to attack whatever spirit causes the pain.

As an artist, Uecker is in a way also a shaman, one who is hypersensitive to the universal energies floating between and linking people and things. He sees connections and causes that are hidden for others. He manages to transform them into his personal nail fields of energy, somewhat comparable to the nkondi. It’s his goal as an artist to heal and protect, even if this requires a process that’s violent and painful. His works are instruments that help us to deal with our emotional responses to what happens in the uncontrollable world in which we live, confronting us with our vulnerability and at the same time protecting us against it.

Uecker describes himself as a seismograph, always in tune with the flow of life. Especially in the 1980s, through his work he reacted more and more directly to concrete situations happening in the world. His works became more chaotic and violent as a reaction to global crises. For instance, his work, Aschemensch, from 1987, was made as a reaction against the nuclear explosion of Chernobyl. Uecker used ashes and coal on canvas to create comforting Ur-figures, primal symbols that inscribe the disasters into the history of the world. The figures are also reminiscent of the contours of the dead bodies left on the pavements of the streets after the explosion. Again inspired by religion—“from dust to dust”—Uecker used ashes because they are a metaphor of a cathartic, cleansing power. Ashes represent death, but also the possibility to rise again.

The Aschemensch is also a kind of self-reflection, and literally a self-portrait of the artist, who made the work by moving his body in ashes on a horizontal canvas. This wild act of covering himself with ashes reminded Uecker of the many corpses that washed ashore from the sunken ship, SS Cap Ancona, on the beaches of the Ostsee. As a 14-year-old boy, the Russians forced him to bury the bodies. With Aschemensch, Uecker tried to cure both his personal existential trauma and the trauma of the world.

In the same year, Uecker made the Sturz series. With these works, he again expressed deep experiences of injury, grief and failure. The nails were violently driven, in chaotic arrangements, and he covered the canvas in black paint. He even used an axe to cut the work in half, creating a split and an open wound. The aspect of destruction was pushed to a limit. The visible wound grew in proportion to the need to awaken people’s consciousness. The work expresses a desire for positive change and a need to rethink the order of the world in order for the world to survive.

As a counterpoint to the violent works, Uecker made the Feld series. In these works, his emotions seem stilled. Here again, he returns to geometrical patterns. Squares and rectangles are completely filled with nails that are often covered with a soothing white paint. This is reminiscent of the kaolin used in African culture to add qualities of purity and invulnerability to an object or person. In Africa, white also meant a gate to the world of the ancestors. The speed with which Uecker drove in the nails to create these works, combined with the light creating a play of shadows on the result, gives the work in Felds a vibrant and energetic character. They’re like waves in a calming breeze.

Uecker considers his nail fields as self-portraits. They are personal meditations. They are open and vulnerable, but in a different way when compared to the other works. In Felds, the nail loses its violent character and becomes an object of meditation, a focal point to concentrate on, drawing you into the vibrating Feld of Günther Uecker’s mind.