The German painter and object artist Günther Uecker was born on 13 March 1930 in Wendorf near Crivitz. Known primarily for his nail pictures, he also creates watercolors, in addition to works made of cords, ash, wood and sand. Uecker lives and works today in Düsseldorf and in St. Gallen and also has a studio in Berlin.
Uecker grew up on the peninsula of Wustrow on the eastern seaboard of Germany and also experienced the end of the Second World War there. The Communism of the Soviet Union does not enable him to process the horror of war in his art, so that Uecker, in 1953, fled the border to the West before the Wall was built. From 1955, he studied with the Expressionist Otto Pankok at the Düsseldorf Academy, where he was able to develop artistically, to practice figuration, abstraction and action, and to create his first reliefs of iron nails. From 1962, he used furniture as a medium for his nail art and, above all, in 1964, took notice of a nail in a piano during a vernissage. After Uecker became a member of the artist group ZERO in 1961, he also studied kinetic light. Together with his artistic colleagues Heinz Mack and Otto PIiene, he is setting up the ZERO space, which consists of white and silver moving objects, at the documenta III in Kassel in 1964. In 1970 Uecker, together with the artists Thomas Lenk, Heinz Mack and Georg Karl Pfahler, exhibited at the Venice Biennale. From the 1980s onwards, Uecker increasingly took up political issues, such as the "ashes" cycle, which refers to the catastrophe of Chernobyl. He also discusses the Iraq war and environmental problems. Other important works are the Stubenmahl for Buchenwald Concentration Camp (1988), the design of the devotional space in the new Reichstag building in Berlin (1999) and the design of the outdoor stage stage for the piece Wilhelm Tell on the Rütliwiese in Switzerland (2004). In 1974, Uecker took over a professorship at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf, which he held until 1995. In order to preserve and promote the ZERO movement, Uecker, Max and Piene founded the "ZERO foundation" in Düsseldorf with the support of the "kunstkunstpalast" foundation in 2008. In addition to numerous exhibitions, Galerie W & K Wienerroither and Kohlbacher in Vienna in 2016 were able to present a large show of his works.