2012
Haunch of Venison, New York
Hardcover + slipcase
84 pages
337 × 247 mm
Günther Uecker was born in 1930 in Wendorf, Germany. Studying painting at the Kunsthochschule Berlin Weissensee from 1949 to 1953, he left East Germany for the West, where he further pursued his artistic training from 1955 through 1958 at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Throughout the 1950s, Uecker cultivated a strong interest in meditative practices and purification rituals, and became fascinated with the philosophies of Buddhism, Taoism, and Islam. He developed rituals of his own, including the repetitive hammering of nails, and proceeded to translate this practice into a central aspect of his work. Hammering dense groupings of nails into panels and readymade objects, he created reliefs that operate between painting and sculpture, and that establish new realms for visual exploration, wherein the patterns of surface, light, and shadow are complex and unpredictable. Multilayered in their meanings, these works are resonant with Uecker’s past, including his memories as a boy of nailing up planks to barricade the windows of his family home at the end of World War II. He also incorporates objects such as monochromatic paint, ash, sand, stone, glass, string, cloth, posts, tree trunks, and other media, using these elemental materials to create works of art imbued with the poetic spirit of order and chaos, creation and destruction. As Uecker declared in 1961, “My objects are a spatial reality, a zone of light. I use mechanical means to overcome the subjective gesture, to objectify, to create a situation of freedom.”
[Lévy Gorvy]
Günther Uecker: Violations-Connections was produced and designed for Uecker's first exhibition of new work in New York in over 40 years. The book combines large-scale illustrations of exhibited works alongside a series of handwritten statements by Uecker. In addition, newly commissioned photographs of the artist at work in his Düsseldorf studio introduce different book sections. The slipcase and covers are bound in a canvas reflecting the raw canvas found in Uecker's work, with cover and spine typography foil-blocked in white.
The slipcase reproduces the book and exhibition title in Brauer Neue, used throughout, while the book cover repeats this text in Uecker's handwritten script in the original German. Uecker's handwritten titles also recur throughout the captions to illustrations.
Texts by Ben Tufnell and Günther Uecker.
