Günther Uecker * Lot n° 232

(born in Wendorf in 1930) Umrahmen “Orange”, titled, signed and dated Uecker’83 on the reverse, nails, painting on canvas and wood, 120 x 120 x 18 cm This work is registered in the Uecker Archiv with the number GU.83.006 and will be noted for inclusion in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné of Günther Uecker Provenance: Erker Galerie, St. Gallen Private Collection, Munich European Private Collection (since 1997) "The nail is at once the navel of a world grasped with physical effort, related to the proportions and ordeals of the human body. And it is the needle with which, in this world, the shocks are recorded. The artist Günther Uecker’s violent acts of craftsmanship capture with seismographic certainty fields of tension and borderline situations in which human life wants to assert itself to the brink of catastrophe and far beyond pain." Günter Engelhard, " Ein Mann auf Vorhut. Das Handlungsfeld des Günther Uecker," in: Uecker in Wien, exhibition catalog, Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Ostfildern bei Stuttgart: Edition Cantz, 1992, p. 11. Günther Uecker's uncompromising oeuvre explores unconventional and brittle aesthetics and great truthfulness as a metaphor of existential experiences. Born in 1930 in Wendorf, Mecklenburg, as one of the main protagonists of the ZERO group, he advocated a new beginning for art, expanding it early on through his methods of installation and actionism. He always links his fundamental interest in the pictorial itself, craftsmanship and the elemental quality of materials such as ash, wood, stone and nails with a reflection of upheaval in social events, strong impressions of nature and fundamental existential questions. In his unique nail paintings, with which he is primarily associated, he finds in the nail an object as powerful as it is poetically charged. "The nail is at once the navel of a world grasped with physical effort, related to the proportions and ordeals of the human body. And it is the needle with which, in this world, the shocks are recorded." Umrahmen Orange from 1983 was created at a time when Uecker was often drawn toward Asian cultures and their ways of thinking. The nails stand in uniform rows on a square grid carefully drawn in pencil. The minimal difference in the alignment of the metal nails, which are hammered in by hand, evokes a play of light and shadow that subtly enlivens the uniform structure of the relief. The Zen-like poetry and tranquillity of the nail field, however, is countered by the irregular frame painted in bright orange, and even more so by the edge of the picture itself, which is as aggressively worked as it is violated. The work is characterised by a dynamic tension that combines mathematical precision and manual force, uniformity and individuality, the greatest possible concentration and expressivity.