Visionary artist Günther Uecker, 95, a central figure of Group Zero, passes away

NEW YORK, NY.- Lévy Gorvy Dayan announced the passing of Günther Uecker. A visionary force in the development of postwar painting and sculpture, the artist has passed away at the age of 95. He was a central figure in Group Zero, which counted among its members Enrico Castellani, Lucio Fontana, Yves Klein, and Piero Manzoni along with founders Heinz Mack and Otto Peine.

For seven decades, Uecker developed white-painted reliefs comprising undulating fields of hammered nails. “My objects are a spatial reality, a zone of light,” he explained. “I use mechanical means to overcome the subjective gesture, to objectify, to create a situation of freedom.” Through endless iteration of his sonic hammering ritual, Uecker consistently yielded poetry anew in his bristling, ethereal surfaces.

Born in 1930 in Wendorf, Germany, Uecker grew up on the Wustrow peninsula, where his family operated a small farm. The landscape left an indelible impression on the artist: “The inspiration for my work comes from nature—my father was a farmer and I still believe our purpose in life is to bring the fruit from the earth.” Uecker’s experiences as a youth provided the tools he would come to use in his art, whether he was leaving marks in earth with a plow, harrow, or rake; or tracking the relationship between the land and the weather, the seasons, or the northern lights. In the final years of the war, Uecker helped to protect his family home from Russian soldiers by nailing planks to the windows as a barricade. In May 1945, British bombers sank a prison ship, and thousands of bodies washed ashore; Uecker was forced by soldiers to bury them. He attributed to this experience his empathy and his determination “to live life with intensity.”

Uecker studied at the Kunsthochschule Berlin Weissensee and Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf. He produced his first nail objects in 1955–56, inspired by the repetitive sounds of Gregorian chants as well as Soviet poet Vladimir Mayakovsky’s injunction that “poetry is made with a hammer.” He developed his practice of integrating nails into canvases, producing reliefs that blur the terms of sculpture and painting. By considering the interrelations of surface, light, and shadow, and by accounting for the movement of the viewer, he established complex, unpredictable visual experiences. Soon, he integrated lightboxes, rotating discs, television sets, and chairs into his nail sculptures.

In 1961, Uecker joined Heinz Mack and Otto Piene in the anti-expressionist movement Group Zero, which prioritized expanding beyond the traditional dimensions of the canvas into kinetic, serial, and participatory realms. In 1965, a comprehensive survey of the movement, Nul 1965, was mounted at the Stedelijk Museum, and Uecker completed his first Sandspirale (Sand Spiral). He moved for a brief period to New York, where his work was included in The Responsive Eye (1965) at the Museum of Modern Art. His first solo exhibition in the United States was mounted in 1966 at Howard Wise Gallery in New York, and Willoughby Sharp wrote an essay for the accompanying catalogue.

After Group Zero’s dissolution in 1966, Uecker’s work incorporated aspects of conceptual and land art, and he began designing stage sets for operas. His 1968 assemblage of sound sculptures, Terrororchester (Terror Orchestra), produced for a presentation with Gerhard Richter at Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, comprised a multisensory response to the era’s political confrontations, social justice issues, and threats to democracy. For Uecker, art was not a utopian realm dazzled by light, but “the space within which he acted out his existence,” as art historian Dieter Honisch has written. In 1974, Uecker was appointed professor at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where he would teach until 1995. Among his public works are From Darkness to Light at the United Nations, Geneva (1978) and a Reflection and Prayer Room for the Reichstag, Berlin (2000). His most recent installation was for the Schwerin Cathedral, Germany (2024), for which he created four monumental stained-glass windows relating to his Lichtbogen paintings (2020) of radiant blue-and-white arcs.

Uecker’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at museums worldwide. Retrospectives of his work have been organized by the Wilhelm-Hack-Museum, Ludwigshafen, Germany (1987); Central House of Artists, Moscow (1988, the first major museum exhibition in the USSR of any Western artist); Kunsthalle München, Munich (1993); and K20 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf (2015), among many others. He participated in Documenta (1964, 1968, 1977) and the 1970 Venice Biennale. His work resides in such collections as the Art Institute of Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Museum of Modern Art, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and Tate, London. His many honors include the Pour le Mérite for Sciences and Arts (2000) and the Staatspreis des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen (2015).

We have had the honor of working with Günther Uecker since 2007. In 2008, Emilio Steinberger organized and included his work in the exhibition Sotto Vocce, and, in 2009, Dominique Lévy invited the artist to participate in the exhibition Beyond Black, White, and Gray at L&M Arts. Of their relationship with the artist, Steinberger and Lévy have said, “We have profound admiration for Günther and the immense legacy he leaves with us—equally for his impact on the history of art, and for his impact as a human being who was so generous with his heart and with his ideas.” In 2016, Dominique Lévy presented Günther Uecker: Verletzte Felder, the artist’s first solo presentation in London in more than fifty years. Later, in New York in 2019, Lévy Gorvy featured Günther Uecker: Notations, debuting new large-scale nail paintings and a selection of watercolors created over three decades during the artist’s many travels. The exhibition was accompanied by a publication featuring a conversation between Uecker and Hans Ulrich Obrist as well as poetry by the artist. In 2024, Lévy Gorvy Dayan presented Material States: Yves Klein and Günther Uecker, which explored the multiple connections between the two artists who were also brothers-in-law—and exhibited historic works including Uecker’s Das gelbe Bild (1957–58) and Klein’s gold-leaf panel Le silence est d’or (MG 10, 1960).

“Art can’t save humanity,” Uecker wrote in 1993, “but with artistic means it is possible to create a dialogue that appeals to human beings to act in the interest of salvation.” As we mourn this immeasurable loss, Lévy Gorvy Dayan remains committed to and inspired by Uecker’s auspicious spirit and the unceasing resonance of his work.