Gunther Uecker
Has been hammering nails into white surfaces since 1957, and made light the point of it.
Gunther Uecker was born in Mecklenburg in 1930 and spent the last days of the war barricading his family home with planks to protect his sisters, nailing them shut — an origin he has cited for what followed. From 1957 he drove nails into painted white panels, chairs, pianos and objects, in fields that lean and swirl so that the shadows they throw become the image and shift as the viewer moves. He joined the ZERO group with Mack and Piene in 1961, and has continued the nail works, alongside ash and sand paintings and stage design, for over sixty years.
The nail reliefs are the market and the ZERO reassessment of the last fifteen years has driven it hard. Condition is unusually decisive: the works depend on an immaculate white surface and on nails standing at their original angles, and bent nails, corrosion, discolouration of the white ground and past overpainting are all common and all materially reduce value — none of it can be corrected invisibly. Nailed objects are unique. There is a substantial output of prints, embossings and works on paper.
If you own a work by Gunther Uecker
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
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Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.