Günther Uecker - Spirale II - image-1

Lot 468 R

Günther Uecker - Spirale II

Auction 1079 - overview Cologne
03.12.2016, 14:00 - Contemporary Art
Estimate: 700.000 € - 1.000.000 €

Günther Uecker

Spirale II
1997

Nails and latex paint on canvas on wood. 200 x 200 x 15 cm. Signed, dated and titled 'SPIRALE II Uecker '97' on wood verso, with dimensions and directional arrow. - Traces of studio.

Lot 467, Günther Uecker, and lot 468, Günther Uecker, will first be offered individually for sale and then offered together as one lot.

“In the nailed structures, Uecker quickly attains a skill which enables him to handle the unmanageable material masterfully. It might not domesticize the inherent potential of aggression but it makes it controllable, at least. The task of nailing accommodates his urge for motoric skills as much as it does to his affinity to actionism with the additional effect of relieving aggression by releasing it. In regular patterns, he drives in the nails into strictly geometric structures which also generate dynamic or expressive force fields through different intervals, differentiated densification, and various angles of inclination. Those force fields become more and more pictorial over the years which Uecker highlights further by the application of a preparatory coat on the pictorial ground and as a result eventually dismisses the nail from its structure-building function”. (Bernhard Holeczek, Formalist oder Mystiker? Handlung und Sinn-Bild im Werk Günther Ueckers, in: Uecker in Schwerin, Staatliches Museum, exhib.cat. 1993. p.15)

Provenance

directly from the artist; Galerie Hete Hünermann, Dusseldorf