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拍品专文
Executed in 1959, Kleines Nagelbild - Weiss (Small Nail Picture - White) is an early example of Günther Uecker’s celebrated nail paintings. A grid-like network of nails is set into a surface of luminous white oil paint, their vertiginous forms punctuating and extending beyond the edges of the canvas. The nails, too, are coated in white. Dating from the outset of his career, the work presages Uecker’s official collaboration with the Zero Group from 1961-66, a movement in which, alongside his contemporaries Heinz Mack and Otto Piene, he sought to reinvent post-war art from a state of blank purity. ‘It was from the start an open domain of possibilities, and we speculated with the visionary form of purity, beauty, and stillness’, Uecker recalled. ‘These things moved us greatly. This was perhaps also a very silent and at the same time very loud protest against Expressionism, against an expression-oriented society’ (G. Uecker, quoted in D. Honisch, Uecker, New York 1983, p. 14). In 1969, the painting was shown alongside works by Mack, Piene, Piero Manzoni, Enrico Castellani and Agostino Bonalumi in Hommage à Fontana at the Kunst- und Museumsverein Wuppertal. Organised following his death in 1968, the group exhibition paid tribute to Lucio Fontana, whose ideas had a profound influence on the Zero artists and their associates.
In its orderly, grid-like network of nails, Kleines Nagelbild - Weiss and other early works owe much to the lesser known ‘Unism’ movement, a group inaugurated by Kazimir Malevich’s student Wladislaw Strzeminski, which advocated for a pictorial harmony of colour, geometry and rhythm. In 1957, Uecker had also been exposed to Yves Klein’s monochromes for the first time. This formative encounter inspired his decision to blanket his own paintings in even white paint or kaolin, creating luminous fields of light and shadow. ‘My works acquire their reality through light,’ he later said. ‘Their intensity is changeable due to the light impinging on them which, from the viewer's standpoint, is variable’ (G. Uecker, quoted in ibid., p. 60). By hammering nails into his works, Uecker further transformed his monochromes into animated fields of movement, creating a series of dynamic, lyrical surfaces that straddled painting and sculpture.
By selecting the humble nail as his signature medium, a material laden with associations of human labour, the artist made reference to his upbringing as a ‘farm boy’ on the Baltic island of Wustrow. The nail had a further personal resonance for Uecker, too. ‘As the front closed [during WWII]’, he explains, ‘I barricaded my house from within, which was only an illusion of safety, of course. But nevertheless, it definitely gave an emotional feeling of protection. And this is what the nails represent in my work: on the one hand a defence, like ruffled hair, like a hedgehog curling up into a ball, but on the other hand tenderness’ (G Uecker, quoted in ‘Interview with Günther Uecker’, in Günther Uecker: The Early Years, exh. cat., L & M Arts, New York, 2011, pp. 8-9). Conjured from nothing more than canvas, pigment and nails, Kleines Nagelbild - Weiss is a striking early example of the elemental magnetism that would come to lie at the core of Uecker’s practice.
In its orderly, grid-like network of nails, Kleines Nagelbild - Weiss and other early works owe much to the lesser known ‘Unism’ movement, a group inaugurated by Kazimir Malevich’s student Wladislaw Strzeminski, which advocated for a pictorial harmony of colour, geometry and rhythm. In 1957, Uecker had also been exposed to Yves Klein’s monochromes for the first time. This formative encounter inspired his decision to blanket his own paintings in even white paint or kaolin, creating luminous fields of light and shadow. ‘My works acquire their reality through light,’ he later said. ‘Their intensity is changeable due to the light impinging on them which, from the viewer's standpoint, is variable’ (G. Uecker, quoted in ibid., p. 60). By hammering nails into his works, Uecker further transformed his monochromes into animated fields of movement, creating a series of dynamic, lyrical surfaces that straddled painting and sculpture.
By selecting the humble nail as his signature medium, a material laden with associations of human labour, the artist made reference to his upbringing as a ‘farm boy’ on the Baltic island of Wustrow. The nail had a further personal resonance for Uecker, too. ‘As the front closed [during WWII]’, he explains, ‘I barricaded my house from within, which was only an illusion of safety, of course. But nevertheless, it definitely gave an emotional feeling of protection. And this is what the nails represent in my work: on the one hand a defence, like ruffled hair, like a hedgehog curling up into a ball, but on the other hand tenderness’ (G Uecker, quoted in ‘Interview with Günther Uecker’, in Günther Uecker: The Early Years, exh. cat., L & M Arts, New York, 2011, pp. 8-9). Conjured from nothing more than canvas, pigment and nails, Kleines Nagelbild - Weiss is a striking early example of the elemental magnetism that would come to lie at the core of Uecker’s practice.