“The door was always open”
A conversation with Günther Uecker in Budapest
MúzeumCafé 34.
In December a large exhibition of works by the internationally renowned artist Günther Uecker opened in the Museum of Fine Arts. In 1977 Uecker participated in the group display Artistic Trends in West Germany after 1945 in the same museum, and he later had solo exhibitions at the Hungarian National Gallery and in Pécs and Veszprém. Two years ago he featured in the Fine Arts Museum’s Art on Lake exhibition and one of his works appears in the museum’s permanent display of 20th-century and contemporary art. Uecker has many friends among Hungarian artists and he often visits Hungarian museums. After the opening of the current exhibition in Budapest he spoke about his memories of Hungary. Uecker remembers Budapest as an international metropolis whose character was determined by both historical consciousness and the reality of the times. Within their rather limited possibilities young artists whom he met pointed at that. The effective barriers at the time cannot be compared to today’s experiences, though the current national objectives, which Uecker can observe only from the outside, similarly take on a character indicating restraint. Günther Uecker was born in 1930. He studied art in Wismar and Berlin-Weißensee between 1949 and 1953, then from 1955 to 1958 at the Academy in Düsseldorf, where he had moved after leaving the GDR in 1953. In 1958 he got involved with the founders of the internationally renowned ZERO group, which he formally joined in 1961. In 1970 he participated in a joint exhibition in the German pavilion at the Venice Biennale with Thomas Lenk, Heinz Mack and Georg Karl Pfaler, and he appeared three times at the Kassel Documenta. He was a professor at the Düsseldorf Academy in the period 1976-95, and in 2005 a retrospective of his works opened at the Martin Gropius Bau in Berlin.