Günther Uecker - The Human Abdudes. 14 Pacified Implements
03.02.2011 — 06.03.2011
District Six Museum, Cape Town
60 Words from the Old Testament. Man's Inhumanity to Man (1992)
“My subject is life and death”, says the artist Günther Uecker, born in Wendorf in Mecklenburg-West Pomerania in 1930, about his work. His “Mistreated Man: 14 pacified implements”, created for the Institute for Foreign Relations between the autumn of 1992 and spring 1993, also lives through the contrast, the discord of these two poles. It is the portrait of an artist, but not at all in the conventional sense. On the contrary, Uecker reacts – in the language of form typical of him, namely slats of wood, linen cloths, nails, stones, ash, sand, pages of writing – to the “injury of human being by human being”, or, to be more exact, to the use of violence against foreigners in Germany. Based on the stations of the Christian Way of the Cross, Uecker has developed fourteen graphic works which bear titles such as “Way of Obstacles”, “White Tears”, “Fireplace”, and “Scourging Mill”. In these works – meant to warn – he expresses his visions of life and life’s suffering and tries to reveal, in his sensitive setting of signs, basic human drives: aggression, injury, destruction, setting against them gestures of reconciliation. As Uecker says, “Thus my protest, my statement is an expression of my agitation, a portrait of an artist in Germany, so to speak.”
