Cara Venzke: Zones of Transition: The Form of the Relief in the Work of Günther Uecker

In her research project, Cara Venzke examines the spatial disposition of Günther Uecker’s so-called “structure pictures.” The starting points of her analysis are the “encirclements” or “enclosures” found in the artist’s work, and in particular his nail works, which Venzke considers in the context of art historical discourses of relief. In this way, a distinctive feature of Uecker’s work emerges: in the interstices of his nail fields, the material and the immaterial merge. Uecker uses the principle of the in-between inherent in works of relief to create states in the transition from one medium to another, and from surface to space, that go far beyond traditional connotations of the formal canon of modernism.