(born in Wendorf in 1930)
Raum zerteilter Vorstellung, 1982, numbered on the reverse 21, nails, dispersion, glue, canvas on wood, 60 x 10 x 6 cm

This work will be included in the upcoming catalogue raisonné currently being compiled by the Uecker Archive.

Provenance:
Galerie Walter Storms, Munich acquired from the above by the present owner in 1982 – Private Collection, Austria

We are grateful to Jacob Uecker for his kind assistance.

The present work is part no. 21 of the thirty-part work ‘Raum zerteilter Vorstellung’, the vertical formated, rectangular pieces of wood are each different in nailing and painting.

The project “Raum zerteilter Vorstellung” [Space of dissected imagination] was performed by Günther Uecker in 1982 in the Galerie Walter Storms in Munich. In an action Günther Uecker split this connected nail object with an axe into 30 individual strips, c. 10 cm wide at the top edge. Hung up at a distance from each other, these individual pieces filled up the entire exhibition space of the Galerie Walter Storms.

The process of execution of his works becomes a ritual for Günther Uecker. It is a carefully prepared setting in which the artist shows his own intentions and feelings completely unequivocally and unsparingly during the creation of the nail object. The white colour of the background of the object “Raum zerteilter Vorstellung” reveals the traces of contact with his hands, painted black, and with the hatchet. In the rectangular nail object, the artist unites the orderly nail structures of his moving fields and the nails, wildly and chaotically driven in all over the place, of his works of the early 1980s. Once again he works the nailed surface with his hands, dipped in white paint. At the conclusion, Günther Uecker breaks up the nail work and systematically splits it up with an axe. The object no. 21 is on the right half of the more than 3 meter long nail object.