Visual Arts in Germany: Exhibitions and Artist Portraits

After the inheritance of modernism had been discredited in the most monstrous fashion by the Third Reich, post-war Germany attempted to pay reparations also to art. Assiduously, one absorbed the avant garde and learned the international language of abstraction.

The Kassel documenta in particular advanced to become the didactic institution in matters of catching-up. Whatever the unintentional element, set up right at the start of the first documenta in 1955 was a sculpture of classical modernism – it was a "kneeling figure"; and when at the third documenta in 1964 contemporary painting received a generous forum, some of the pictures were hung on the ceiling. The readiness, at any rate, to belittle oneself and to look up to paragons has stubbornly persisted.

An art of process

All the more clearly striking must have been works of art which required a completely different attitude in the viewer, which changed themselves, which demanded participation, which played with light and shadow as if they were raw materials, and used materials that every do-it-yourselfer had at home. When Günther Uecker came forward in the fifties with his nail pictures, contemporary art gained a new elan. Although the pictures had canvasses as a ground, nails in addition to colour were applied to them. The picture became an object, painting an iridescent thing in the interference zone of the arts. Uecker's newness consisted not least in his refusal of the posture of the individual genius. What was now on the agenda were structure, seriality, repetition, were the magic words of a post-expressionist art of process, oriented to transparency and system.

Uecker came to the Federal Republic of Germany in 1955. Born in 1930 in Mecklenburg, he grew up in a region that was later to belong to the German Democratic Republic. Here he completed his first artistic training, including study at the renown Academy of Art at Berlin-Weissensee. In the West, Uecker continued his training at the no less renown Art Academy in Düsseldorf. In the Rhenish art milieu he began to be successful. He had his first exhibitions at the art gallery of the important Düsseldorf gallerist Alfred Schmela.

"To see the sky from above"

The reservoir of the young art scene at this time of change was Group ZERO, which Otto Piene and Heinz Mack launched in 1958. Three years later, Uecker joined. This was a step into the international scene not only for him. The "Nouveaux Réalistes" in France, the kineticists in Italy and ZERO in Germany worked together on an opening of artistic practice into reality. Art should no longer know any boundaries, just as reality should no longer know any boundaries. The fever of space exploration had infected everybody. The dissolution of pictures into the immaterial, into the intangibility of pure vision or the ideality of utopian projects, went hand in hand with the enthusiasm for a technology which was to make all this possible. Such art also always provides models. Or, as Uecker wrote in 1962, "Light will make us fly, and we will see the sky from above".

The dissolution of pictures into immateriality presupposes a special sensibility for the materiality of things, and perhaps in this is founded Uecker's turn towards everything natural and processive which distinguishes his work as a whole. With his nail pictures Uecker had acquired nothing less than a trademark, but this is not to detract from the great variety of his œuvre, and the comprehensive survey of Uecker's work in honour of his 75th birthday, for which three Berlin exhibitions sites have joined forces, is especially dedicated to this variety. The exhibition is called Zwanzig Kapitel (i.e., Twenty Chapters). Nineteen of these will be shown at the Martin-Gropius-Bau, the twentieth at the Neue Nationalgalerie, and the Neue Berliner Kunstverein (i.e., New Berlin Civic Art Association) will join in with a retrospective of Uecker's water-colours.

Homage

The trio of exhibitions is a deserved homage. A homage to one of the most important artists of the post-war period of the Federal Republic. An artist whose whole German identity has been perceived only with German re-unification. An artist, finally, who was perhaps the first in Germany to possess a thoroughly international stature.

Günther Uecker: Zwanzig Kapitel. Ed. by Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Alexander Tolnay; Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern, March 2005; 200 pages, 39,80 €, ISBN 3-7757-1584-3.