Lot 605 D

Günther Uecker has taken an interest in Japanese Zen Buddhism since the early 1950s, and his works therefore visualise his attitude to life, both as an artist and as an individual. All his nailings are discussions of light, movement and white as an "ideal" colour. They are consciously created by the artist in such a way that they can serve as an experience of consciousness which may culminate in white as a "state":
"Using prefabricated elements such as nails, I built up several white structures which I consciously called objects, because they differed from a pictorial projection onto a canvas. I started by using strictly sequenced rhythms, mathematical sequences, which dissolved into a free rhythm… I then focused on achieving an integration of light that caused the white structures to oscillate under changes of lighting and which could be understood as freely articulated light space. I opted for a white zone as a culmination of colourfulness, as a climax of light and as a triumph over darkness. It is, I believe, a white world, a humane world, in which a person experiences their colourful existence and in which they can be alive. These white structures can be a spiritual language in which we begin to meditate. White, as a state, can be understood as prayer and, when it is articulated, can be a spiritual experience. (Günther Uecker, Der Zustand Weiss, in: Stephan von Wiese (ed.), Günther Uecker, Schriften, Gedichte, Projektbeschreibungen, Reflexionen, St. Gallen 1979, p.104.)
Moreover, by using his own body as a yardstick for his creation, Uecker merges the boundaries between the artist or person and the actual work of art: "My body has played a role in the proportions of my works from the very beginning. I used the nails as a way to articulate light, and the distance between them originated from the ratios of my own hands. In fact, I used the thickness of my fingers for the distances between the nails, so the spaces were the proportions of my hand. The handiness of an object always related to physical dimensions. It was like archery: again and again I tried to establish this connection between my limited perception and my physical limits. I believe that all these sensory dimensions have certain border areas which one might describe as areas of beauty. When we use human proportions as a basis, then everything we do becomes beautiful. This is why the human figure and indeed its transmutations were a focal area for me. As I had been brought up to depict man, I repeatedly made man visible in new dimensions." (Die Transmutation des Immer-Gleichen, interview of Günther Uecker by Freddy de Vree, in: Stephan von Wiese (ed.), Günther Uecker, Schriften, Gedichte, Projektbeschreibungen, Reflexionen, St. Gallen 1979, p.167.)