Günther Uecker (1930–2025)

It is with great sadness that we bid farewell to Günther Uecker—one of the defining artists of our time, a humanist thinker, engaged mentor, and namesake of our institute. Günther Uecker supported us with his openness, his lively spirit, and his curiosity. For many of the recipients of our scholarship, he was not merely a subject of aesthetic study, but also an interlocutor, someone who took an interest in their work, asking questions and encouraging them to go further in their own work. A simple visit to his studio in the winter of 2023—alongside alumni of our institute and guests—became for all of us a moving experience. Günther Uecker’s attitude was characterized by his sense of dedication, and by his earnest, unshakeable belief that the artist bears a responsibility towards society. We take this attitude as our guide, and it characterizes the work of our institute to this day. We are grateful for the trust that Günther Uecker placed in us—and for the legacy that lives on in his work, in the thoughts he shared, and in the inspiration his work gives to so many of us. Our thoughts are with his family and all those who were close to him.

With the death of Günther Uecker, the art world has lost one of its most influential voices—a voice which did much to articulate post-war German modernism and continued to shape artistic discourse to this day. Born in 1930 in Wendorf, Germany, near the Baltic Sea, Uecker became internationally known for his iconic “nail paintings.” His body of work, however, extends far beyond these iconic mixed-media images. It traces an arc of artistic and existential transformation, one grounded in a commited witnessing of the world—the transformation of destruction into form, of personal and collective traumas into expressions of universal humanity.

As a child, Uecker experienced the Second World War in all its shocking immediacy. After studying in Wismar and what was by then East Berlin, he left the GDR in 1953 to study at Düsseldorf Art Academy (1955–1957), where he received his degree. He turned away from figurative representation early in his career, seeking new means of expression such as light, movement, and non-standard materials. Painting became for him a multi-dimensional space of action, a zone in which he foregrounded the traces of his own activity. In his “finger paintings,” for instance, he quite literally felt his way through the canvas to the image, creating with his chosen instrument, the nail, depressions and protrusions upon them. From out of these works developed the nail “reliefs” that he would create from the late 1950s onwards. In them, thousands of nails, hammered into rhythmic waves across the image ground, form vibrating fields that both refract light and cast shadows, incorporating the spaces in which the works are hung. These are not static objects, but, rather, energetic structures—pulsating surfaces that appear to follow the logic of the swarm, revealing their own aesthetic cosmos through similarly organic thrusts of movement. The large-format work Weißer Schrei (White Cry, 1991) from the Schwerin collection is one major later example of this characteristic approach to creating forms which seem to resist a totalizing visual comprehension, even as they dare the eye to look closer.

Uecker became part of the artist group ZERO in 1958, joining Heinz Mack and Otto Piene. He made his first public appearance in this context when he took part in the exhibition Das rote Bild. ZERO was more than just a style—it represented a radical new artistic beginning in a deeply insecure society. At a time when Germany was struggling with the burden of its National Socialist past, these artists sought a “zero point”—a new aesthetic and ethical beginning existing outside the onus of history. Uecker’s works can be seen as rooted deeply in this field of tension, in the problem of rendering the felt immediacy of destruction, injury, and violence without being destructive acts themselves. The searching and probing the artist engaged in during their creation are left as visible traces of a place beyond the purely formal, a zone more human, experiential. Closely associated with the group from 1961 to 1966, Uecker continued to experiment with the expanded possibilities of action art, as, for example with the large-scale work Terror Orchestra or temporary projects like Museums can be habitable places, in which, together with Gerhard Richter, the artists exhibited their works and lived, slept, and worked in the host institution.

From the 1970s onwards, political themes increasingly became the focus of his work. This was also the time when he began his career as a professor at the Düsseldorf academy (1974–1995). His extensive installations of works centered on strife, oppression, and ecological catastrophe—the Vietnam War, the Chernobyl disaster, the explosion of violence seen in right-wing extremist riots in Rostock in 1992, the terrorist attacks of September 11, to name several topics he engaged with—would signal a shift in the deeply inscribed humanistic impulse of his art toward new ethical dimensions. Uecker’s work remained committed to the plight of mankind, to people themselves, without ever resorting to approaches didactic or preachy. “The injury of man done by man,” as the artist put it, formed for him the initial factor in what was sometimes a painful confrontation. In later works, such as the large-format sand drawings, he would come to take a meditative, almost contemplative approach to these concerns, proving that a reduction in means in no way necessitates an abdication of moral fortitude, but can, rather, foster needed clarity and inner expansiveness or grace.

Günther Uecker’s importance for the German and international art landscape can hardly be overestimated. His works have been shown at all the major exhibitions of contemporary art—from documenta to the Venice Biennale—and are represented in the world’s most important museums. And yet his achievement also exists beyond such physical markers of renown: in his transformation of a wounded and divided post-war culture into an artistic language of radical openness; in his ability to bring movement into the aesthetic reception of a work; and in his thoughtful, compassionate approach to the translation of thought and feeling into form. Günther Uecker died on June 10, 2025 at the age of 95.