Dark Field

Uecker made art objects stripped of ‘naivety and romanticisation’ since the 1950s . He transformed traditional artistic gestures into a form of manual and physical labour, which is why he hammered, nailed and chiselled more than he painted. In 1957 he introduced both a made-to-measure nail and a monotonous hammering of those nails as his main trademark. ‘In essence, the…

Uecker made art objects stripped of ‘naivety and romanticisation’ since the 1950s . He transformed traditional artistic gestures into a form of manual and physical labour, which is why he hammered, nailed and chiselled more than he painted. In 1957 he introduced both a made-to-measure nail and a monotonous hammering of those nails as his main trademark. ‘In essence, the nail is an extension that I hold in my hand’. If Uecker’s nail was the brush then the hammer was the painter’s palette. He hammered his nails into traditional supports like canvases and panels, but also into tables, televisions, record players and pianos. Uecker’s nail fields take the form of geometrical constructions, spirals and free structures. By hammering thousands of nails swiftly and rhythmically at different angles and patterns from the centre of a square panel, he transformed the two-dimensional surface of ’the painting’ into a spatial object in this Dark field. The work of art transcends its reality and enters into an interaction with the space in which viewers find themselves. They then observe a fluctuating interplay of light and motion of seemingly swaying nailheads, depending on their own position and motion. The illusion of motion is reinforced by the maximum contrast between the black ground and the rhythmic dance of light reflections off the steel nails, each of which casts its own shadow. ‘The way that I use nails as structuring elements demonstrates that they should not be understood as nails.’ Nails feel and look like hard objects that can be experienced as menacing. A nail can be a symbol of violence, for example. One only has to think of the Crucifixion. Uecker’s nail fields call that customary experience into question. His nails are swallowed up visually into an extremely soft and sloping field. They appear to become supple and soft, like cornstalks in the wind. The feeling of menace, but also the suggestion of hard physical labour with everyday objects and tools is transformed into a poetic and aesthetic experience of beauty and boundlessness. Uecker’s art makes something beautiful out of daily life. Uecker presented his first ‘nail objects’ at the exhibition Motion in vision – Vision in motion in the Hessenhuis in Antwerp, the ‘headquarters’, of the G58 movement. That was the first foreign exhibition of the originally German ZERO movement around Otto Piene en Heinz Mack. Uecker officially joined it in 1961. Those progressive artists shared their post-war belief in a social and artistic zero point, with endlessly new opportunities as a consequence. They freed themselves from the traditional manner of painting with paint on canvas, and found each other in a wider exploration of such subjects as light, space and motion. In 1979-1980, by way of a review of this historic connection in Antwerp, they mounted the retrospective show Zero Internationaal, after which the museum bought this nail structure from Uecker.