Gunther Uecker

The act of driving a nail is monotonous, yet it has to be carried out with great care; Uecker, who had already become interested in Zen Buddhism at an early date, saw an activity in which a balance exited between its meditative qualities and its aggressive nature.The first nail objects arose in the late fifties. Initially, Uecker restricted himself to Punctuation and the creation of a Perforated Structure , as two works from 1957 and 1958 were called that featured nails, or, to be more precise, "the principle of the nail as a point, as a hole driven into the pictorial surface, or as a trace of a hole," as Wieland Schmied wrote on the occasion of an exhibition in the Kestner Society in Hanover. During the time that followed, Uecker refined his method. The protruding, projecting steel pin proved to be the ideal vehicle for his artistic purposes. "Where two lines touch," Uecker wrote, "is a point. That is where I drive a nail. The nail's shadow creates a new line - the movement of the shadow develops into a perception of time." Point, line, a shadow varying according to the light source and the resulting symbolic representation of the passage of time - these are the coordinates within which Uecker established his working method.

It's only after taking a closer look, however, that it becomes clear how deceptive the initial impression actually is - that the apparent "nature" actually derives from another, harder nature. While the contrasts dominate at a distance, seen from close up, the works produce an oscillation of perception between optical deception and the knowledge of a highly concrete, nearly banal objectivity. It almost seems as though the picture's effect were spreading into the room, determining it: "My attempt at activating a real space through creating structures, to enable that space to be experienced as a pure state of objective aesthetics, led me to pursue new formal means," Uecker stated in the early sixties. "I use nails as structural elements; I don't want them to be seen as nails. In using these means, I'm concerned in creating an oscillation in their ordered relationship to one another, one that disturbs their geometric order, is capable of unsettling it. The white objects are to be seen as a state of extreme intensity in continuous change, due to the fluctuation in light. I consider mutability to be important; it is able to convey the beauty of movement."