Private collection, Bavaria (acquired from Walter Storms Galerie, Munich)

Dated in black brush on the reverse: .08

Few materials are as commonplace and yet as symbolically charged as the nail. In the late 1950s, Günther Uecker brought it from the workshop into the realm of art, transforming it into the instrument of a new visual language in which light, rather than paint, became the primary medium. As a member of the ZERO group, which he joined in the early 1960s alongside Heinz Mack and Otto Piene, he became one of the defining figures of the European post-war avant-garde. Until his death in Düsseldorf in 2025, the nail remained Uecker’s central means of expression.
Created in 2008, “Interferenzen” (Interferences) features hundreds of closely spaced nails covering a white-painted surface, yet they do not follow a rigid grid. Instead, they form arcs and segments of circles that appear to radiate from different centres, intersecting one another like ripples meeting on the surface of water. The title is to be understood quite literally: in physics, interference describes the superposition of waves that reinforce or cancel one another. In Uecker’s work, the shadows cast by the nails overlap as well. Depending on the angle of the light and the viewer’s position, the patterns shift, light and dark alternate, and the image is never quite the same twice. The viewer thus becomes an active participant, for it is only through movement that the work comes to life.
At the same time, Uecker’s work has always retained an element of ambiguity. Driving the nails into the surface is a forceful, almost aggressive act, and the artist himself repeatedly drew attention to the material’s capacity to inflict injury. Yet the result is an image of profound stillness and contemplation, in which violence is transformed into rhythm and hardness into light. This tension between aggression and meditation gives Uecker’s later nail paintings their distinctive power. “Interferenzen” expresses it with the assured mastery of an artist who spent more than five decades perfecting his use of this material. DvS