(born Wendorf in 1930)
Untitled, 1968, signed and dated Uecker 68 and dedicated “for Hüppi”, nails, hammer, silver and dispersion on 2-part wooden box, 91 x 130 x 67.5 cm (opened out), (PS)

View this three-dimensional object in our short Video.

Confirmation of the authenticity issued by the artist, 1968 (9 pages, see ill., p. 43)

Provenance:
Alfons Hüppi, Switzerland – directly from the artist
Private Collection, Germany – acquired there by the present owner

Exhibited:
Kunsthalle Baden Baden 1968, Gerhard Richter and Günther Uecker – Museen können bewohnbare Orte sein.

“In April 1968 Richter and I lived in the Kunsthalle Baden Baden. This exhibition of our personal living space was an example of the dissolution of existing museum practice.” (Günther Uecker)
(Günther Uecker, Schriften, in: Museen können bewohnbare Orte sein (1968), St. Gallen 1979, p. 67)

The work was exhibited in the Kunsthalle Baden Baden in 1968. The ‘occupation’ and ‘storming’ of the Kunsthalle in 1968 by Günther Uecker and Gerhard Richter, both of whom had had their own exhibition in the Kunsthalle by this time, marked a trend reversal in Uecker’s work.

In his works dating to the late 1960s, Günther Uecker directs the viewer’s attention to the structure, movement and effect of light. Using the box, the nails and the hammer, the artist shifts his typical tools taken from practical life into the aesthetic arena, creating a manifest relationship between the reality of daily life and art. The nails are his tools, yet at the same time they form elements which come together as structures, creating patterns and movements, each individual nail lost in the field of nails and coming together to form a structured field of view. Uecker’s hands, as underlined in his dedication “made with my own hands”, enclose a cutout of the box into which nails have been hammered both inside and outside. The hand cutouts break up the unity of the box shape, themselves nailed together with the hammer to the inside of the box lid. The tools remain conjoined with the work as an additional structural element.