Günther Uecker | Wasserfall I and II
Wasserfall I and II
1997
Nails on canvas and wood with white latex
98 3/8 x 59 inches (250 x 150 cm)
© 2019 Günther Uecker / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Germany
In the monumental diptych Wasserfall I and II (1997), a dense array of variously slanted nails articulates the cascading rapids of its subject. Here Günther Uecker references the Rhine Falls, a well-known landmark outside of St. Moritz that is geographically notable for a large stone bisecting the waterfall. Demonstrating his description of the nail as “fragile and poetically sustainable in their visual perception,” Wasserfall I and II constitutes a highly personal yet elegantly abstract homage to the natural beauty of Europe. Uecker has long conceived of his nail paintings as metaphorical sites for the exploration of themes both existential and personal. Accordingly, Wasserfall I and II is an eminently ethical meditation on the themes of human violence, ecological fragility, and the incessant passage of time.
To create the diptych, Uecker stretched canvases over thick pieces of wood, intuitively painting each surface with swathes of opaque, white paint evocative of the mists and sprays of water found at the base of the falls. Undulating patterns of nails—a material the artist has employed since the late 1950s—were then hammered into the support in forms suggestive of an eternally flowing river. Uecker often works in white monochrome, allowing the light of the room to suggest an ever-shifting form that appears to materialize and dissolve as one moves about the work. The artist was drawn to the Rhine Falls for its prehistoric origins and symbolic power: wending through the Engadin valley of the Swiss Alps, the Rhine is perhaps the most notable geologic feature of northern Europe, and the falls into which it flows are the largest on the continent. Accordingly, Uecker conceives the Rhine as an intensely charged symbol, one representative of the uncontrollable forces of both history and nature. Thus, the waterway’s culmination in the falls referenced in Wasserfall I and II, Uecker posits, is perhaps the ultimate representation of contemporary humanity’s chronological origins, with the flow of the river constituting an ancient force of life that extends from Europe’s earliest human eras through the present day. By turns intensely physical and transcendently profound, Wasserfall I and II is exemplary of Uecker’s singular ability to coalesce the visceral with the philosophical.