Gazette Drouot logo print
Lot n° 38

Günther Uecker, Splitter Nails and paint on canvas...

Estimate :
100 000 - 150 000 EUR

Günther Uecker, Splitter Nails and paint on canvas on wood Approx. 78 x 53 x 16 cm (hanging). Signed, dated and titled 'Uecker 99 Splitter Uecker '99' verso on wood and canvas, and with direction arrows. - Traces of studio. This work is registered in the Uecker Archiv under the number GU.99.050.6 and will be noted for inclusion in the forthcoming Uecker Catalogue Raisonné. D Provenance Galerie Edith Wahlandt, Stuttgart; private collection, Baden-Wuerttemberg Exhibitions Stuttgart 1999/2000 (Galerie Edith Wahlandt), Günther Uecker, Entgrenzung, Vertreibung, exhib.cat. p.40/41 with col.illus. Günther Uecker’s work explores light, movement, and structure, and is best known for his use of nails driven into surfaces. These nail reliefs play with shadows and perception to create rhythmic, structured patterns. The work shown here, 'Splitter' (1999), differs from these earlier, rhythmic nail reliefs'Splitter' refers to a splinter or fragment, and indeed, this work deals with fragmentation and rupture. While his earlier works are more meditative, regular, and rhythmic, this piece is chaotic rather than controlled, featuring splintered pieces of wood at the edges and nails hammered irregularly into the wood and coated with white paint. A strong sense of rupture, after-effect, and unresolved tension emerges. Uecker’s art is not only aesthetic but also deeply reflective, frequently addressing themes such as violence, spirituality, and human vulnerability. He created the Splitter cycle, consisting of twelve works, in response to the Kosovo War in the late 1990s; the works function as anti-war memorials that express destruction, displacement, and human suffering. Rather than referencing past traumas such as World War II, which significantly shaped his earlier work, this relief can also be understood as a contemporary response that conveys a sense of urgency and immediacy. “So here, the situation is that I have, so to speak, shattered my own works, and even in many earlier works, one can recognise forms of expression that convey my feeling - namely, that we also have an illiterate dimension to communicate, in the sense of the eikon, the image, that the image acts directly on the soul—a phenomenon we also know from Russian Orthodox and Greek Orthodox culture. It is an experience I had, for example, in the Soviet Union when it still existed, deep in the hinterlands of the Urals, that these images affect people with a message of life-preserving content.” (Günther Uecker, Entgrenzung, Vertreibung, exhib.cat., Galerie Edith Wahlandt, Stuttgart 1999, p.16)

Friday 05 June 2026 - 18:00 - Live
Neumarkt, 3 - 50667 Cologne, Allemagne