"My objects are a spatial reality, a zone of light. [...] I use mechanical means to overcome the subjective gesture, to objectify, to create a situation of freedom." (Günther Uecker, in: ZERO 3, 1961)

The painter and object artist Günther Uecker has died at the age of 95. He achieved international fame as a member of the ZERO movement in the early 1960s. With his characteristic nail reliefs, kinetic experiments as well as light and spatial works, Uecker shaped an art that unmistakably combined materiality, structure, seriality and spiritual contemplation. As a three-time documenta participant and long-time professor at the Düsseldorf Art Academy, the Mecklenburg native and trained carpenter, who moved to the Rhineland in 1953 as a refugee from the GDR to study art, is one of the outstanding pioneers of German post-war art. His preferred working material - the carpenter's nail - became his unmistakable trademark from 1957 onwards and was probably used millions of times over the course of his almost seven decades of work.

Uecker's contribution to documenta 3 in 1964 - together with Heinz Mack and Otto Piene - marked a special milestone. The three Düsseldorf artists were included comparatively late in Arnold Bode's “Light and Movement” section, which was set up at short notice - at a time when their gallery owner Alfred Schmela had already protested against their (supposed) exclusion in a letter to Werner Haftmann. Under the sloping ceilings on the barren upper floor of the Fridericianum, they presented their “Lichtraum – Hommage à Fontana”, a seven-part installation of kinetic light objects, including the joint works ‘Silbermühle’ and “Weiße Mühle” as well as a slide projection of a work by Lucio Fontana, who had not been invited to participate by the Kassel exhibition organizers that year. Uecker was also represented as an individual artist in 1964 with three monochrome-white nailed structural reliefs.

After the dissolution of the ZERO group in 1966, Günther Uecker continued his artistic work consistently and with growing international resonance. In addition to two further documenta participations in 1968 and 1977, his involvement in the German Pavilion at the 35th Venice Biennale (1970) – together with Georg Karl Pfahler and Kasper Thomas Lenk – is one of the many milestones in his long career. With his ash paintings of the 1980s, he reacted to the Chernobyl reactor accident and the ongoing destruction of the environment by man; in 1998, he designed a prayer room in the German Bundestag. Just six months ago, in December 2024, new, colorful stained glass windows based on his design were inaugurated in Schwerin Cathedral in his presence.