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Do I make it out of actual caramel or clay, or something similar to  caramel colour?

What do I use for plastic wrapping? Cellophane? Vinyl?

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So... Care. There are so many meanings to a four letter word. Now that I look at the meanings, I feel like it's actually a sad word. There is a common theme in the meanings, they have sad words in them. (Painful, sickness, anxiety concern) But one word strikes me the most. That word being, "grief."

In a way, the work I want to create is about grief and grieving.
Mar 5, 2021 2:00 AM

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Cared/caring
1: a: to feel trouble or anxiety
cared for his safety

b: to feel interest or concern
care about freedom
2:  to give care
care for the sick

3: a: to have a liking, fondness, or taste
don't care for your attitude

b: to have an inclination
would you care for some pie

Thanks Merriam-Webster.

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1: suffering of mind : GRIEF

2: a: a disquieted state of mixed uncertainty, apprehension, and  responsibility oppressed by sickness, grief, or care
— William Wordsworth
also : something that causes such a state : a particular worry, concern, etc.
Relax and leave all your cares behind.

b: a cause for such anxiety

3: a: painstaking or watchful attention
his gentlemen conduct me with all care to some securest lodging
— John Keats

4: regard coming from desire or esteem
a care for the common good

6: a person or thing that is an object of attention, anxiety, or solicitude
The flower garden was her special care.

Thanks Merriam-Webster.

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I've always wondered when you start understanding your surroundings as a child. When I think about what I remember, I can remember certain fragments, and relationships that I can now contextualize.  When your'e young, I at least don't think you understand what is actually happening around you. You understand that is "X" happening because of "Z."

Where does this bring me. I honestly don't even know.  Where am I even going with this. I REALLY don't know. But I think my reflection will bring me somewhere important.

When I think about a certain fragment of my childhood, I have these strong feelings of love. Pure pure love. A love that I think is very rare. But what is "Care."  It's never been a clear word to me. There are various definitions of Care. When I think about the word care, I think of "taking care of someone." I see it in a positive light. But really what does it mean?

You can see I really did my research about the word Care...

Mar 5, 2021 12:00 AM

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Care and fragility and how they are connected.

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Damien Hirst Relics documentary - English

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This 26 minute documentary -- made by Oxford Film and Television and narrated by David Thewlis -- tells the story of Damien Hirst's first solo exhibition in the Middle East ('Relics', QMA, Doha: 10 October 2013 -- 22 January 2014).

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I like the idea that something looks like its stuck in time. Maybe because the piece I want to create makes me want to stay in that time period.

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Hans Ulrich Obrist You often work in series.

Damien Hirst I've always liked series. I remember looking at Robert Motherwell's painting when I was young. Do you know 'Splashes by the Sea'? I thought that was great.

You get some sort of security from the repetition of a series. If you say something twice, it's pretty convincing. It's more convincing than if you say it once. [Laughs].

I think it's also an implication of endlessness, which kind of theoretically helps you avoid death. I've thought quite a lot about it. In a way, that's why smoking is so sexy. Apart from the addiction, the attraction is that there's nothing certain in life and things change all the time, but you can always rely on something like a cigarette - which punctuates your whole existence time and time again - to be the same. It's almost like you're cheating death. But it's killing you, so then, smoking becomes even sexier. People are afraid of change, so you create a kind of belief for them through repetition. It's like breathing. So I've always been drawn to series and pairs. A unique thing is quite a frightening object.

HUO A sort of umbilical cord in your work, which is more than a series, is the idea of the aquarium. You've spoken about that in many interviews before, but I thought it would be interesting if we could touch on it briefly. It revisits Minimalism but recharges it with a very different content. So how did this aquarium idea start?

DH I've always had a thing about glass. I had a magic mushroom experience very early on where I got a bit freaked out about being symmetrical. I imagined I had a sheet of glass running right through me. Glass became quite frightening. I think glass is quite a frightening substance. I always try and use it. I love going around aquariums, where you get a jumping reflection so that the things inside the tank move; glass becomes something that holds you back and lets you in at the same time. Its' an amazing material; it's something solid yet ephemeral. It's dangerous as well. I just love glass. And it's a way to separate people but engage them. You can invite them in and keep them away at the same time. It's probably my favourite material, glass. And water. No, my favourite material is water and then glass. But glass and water are very similar. Glass in water is amazing; glass disappears if you put it in water.

HUO And there's the series of animals in formaldehyde.

DH 'Natural History ' that was called. I just imagined a zoo of dead animals. I keep thinking that I'm done with that, but then I recently had the idea for the crucifixions, which I think are fucking brilliant; I have to do that. I think there's a narrative within those now. I was also thinking about doing the Stations of the Cross as fourteen cabinet pieces. I don't really think they're a series. I'm not sure.

HUO If one thinks about all the different series, one can see your whole work as a sort of open system from which new series start and others stop.

DH I think they're aspects of personality. It's shit to go on the wall at the end of the day. You're decorating apartments a lot of the time; it's something to go over the sofa. I remember my friend Joe Strummer said to me that a long time ago, cavemen used to go out and smash buffalo over the head and bring them back and cook them and eat them. Then at some point there were are a couple of guys who got their hands in the blood and put something on the cave wall. It was just about making the cave nice. Art came out of the desire to make your habitat more interesting. I love that. Or even music - the guy who started banging bones together and the other guys said, 'We like the sound of that and we like the way the walls look. Why don't you guys stay her and we'll get the meat for you, so at least when we get back to eat the meat we'll be in a cool place?' So I've always loved that kind of view of art: that art is a reflection of life. I think there's an infinite number of ways to get to the same point. Every artwork is fundamentally the same thing.

HUO Some of your work links to display features in science museums, and other works have more to do with scientific formulas. I'm interested in this relationship to science. Can you talk about that?

DH I just hitched a ride on science - or not really science - it was medicine. It's just collage, isn't it? Art is always very simple, or good art is always very simple. I took science in the way that Picasso took the bike seat and the handlebars and made the bull's head. I mean, there's nothing complicated about it. Science seemed to be getting people's attention and art didn't, so I hitched a ride on that. Or people were believing in science and questioning art, so I just took it very directly and used the science. It's been a very rich vein for me. It also partly came from David Cronenberg's film 'Dead Ringers'.

HUO 'Dead Ringers'was the original of all the ' Medicine Cabinet ' works?

DH Yes. Jeremy Irons as a gynaecologist, in the red fucking robes, and those weird gynaecological instruments that were like art. It was that real high-end medical stuff. And I saw some dark, smoked cabinets in there and I thought, 'Fucking hell. They look great.' And so I made some myself. That, combined with seeing Jeff Koons' Hoovers, and all that Neo-Geo stuff and Kurt Schwitters. I was thinking, 'What would Kurt Schwitters be doing if he was alive today?' Bless him, he'd be down the pub. He'd be a priest.

HUO I think he might just have continued his Merzbau.

DH Yes. He'd have finished it.

HUO Because nothing could really stop him from doing it.

DH Only one thing.

HUO Death.

DH Death, yes. Don't you hate that guy?

HUO Schwitters?

DH Death. No, I like Schwitters. I just fucking hate death. He's such a dumb guy.

HUO It's a dull fact. Leon Golub called death, 'A dull fact'.

DH If it's true. I don't know if it's true. [Pause] Come on, it can't be true!

HUO It's a rumour.

DH Elvis is still around. And sex doesn't really make babies. How the fuck could that work?

HUO Another rumour.

DH Yes, it's a rumour. It's bullshit. I heard a great quote by George Burns, the American comedian. Somebody asked him in an interview when he was about 96, 'What do you think about death?' And he said, 'It's been done'. [Laughs].

HUO [Laughs] Great! We were talking about science.

DH Yes, the whole story of it, alchemy and everything; it's fantastic. Trying to understand the world, looking for the keys to understanding: that's what artists do as well in some ways. It's like God should be, the way they sell you the pills, the forms, the utopia, the hope, the cure. We've come a long way since quack doctors.

HUO Were you inspired by science museums?

DH Yes. I love them: science museums, natural history museums, anything that takes your mind off death, really, or focuses your mind on it. I love all that hands-on stuff. It's great when you feel that you're being entertained and also educated. I've always felt if you could do that with art it would be great.

HUO I'm interested in finding out more about how you work, in terms of the collection, archives and studios. Picasso said one should never give up a studio: you should shut the door and take a new one and forget about it and accumulate more studios. Each time we've met, you've mentioned another place and it seems as if you've got lots of studios all over the world.

DH I think you should definitely shut them down. Somebody once said to me, 'Which bit do you like the most? You must love it when you've got all these big machines and tanks and people and they're all in the gallery piling stuff in and there's all this chaos.' I said, 'No. I fucking hate it.' I like it when it's all one and there's just a perfect exhibition at the end. Picasso was obsessed with fame, he wasn't he? He thought every time he wiped his ass people would find it important. I'm more convinced by the Beatles than Picasso these days.

HUO Why the Beatles more than Picasso?

DH They had much more influence on the people around them at the time, and they were struggling with truth in a much deeper way. They grew up in public and they went through so many changes. Picasso is brilliant, don't get me wrong, especially the late Picasso. Maybe it's because I'm an artist... When I was a kid, I just loved the Beatles. I think I wanted to be the Beatles or something. It's funny because I was from a different generation. I wasn't around when the Beatles were around. I was born in 1965, so I witnessed it second hand, in the same way, I suppose, that you witness Picasso second hand. And then I was too young to be a punk. A lot of our generation missed the punk thing that really split everything wide open; we came in the wake of it. We were like punk artists. Some of us have a lot of the attitude. I always thought; especially when you look at the Beatles and the artists who were around at the time - Richard Hamilton and Peter Blake - that the Beatles really made a different. The artists, especially compared to the Americans, didn't really.

HUO Warhol made a difference.

DH Yes, it was Warhol and the Beatles. With Picasso, maybe the talent is a little too apparent. I don't know. Picasso became his own idea of himself; he created a persona and he lived it, whereas the Beatles split at the height of their fucking success, which is a phenomenal thing to do. They just got sick of it; they said, 'We're not going on tour any more.' They were never just going to take the money. Which is great for people from a working-class background.

HUO Warhol is in your collection. Can you talk a little bit about him?

DH Warhol's great. You can't argue with it. It's simple, isn't it? And visually great. It's easy, cheap, simple. He certainly doesn't over-complicate things. I think that's good. And in terms of consumerism and all that sort of stuff, art has been in a constant battle for hundreds of years with every other kind of image-making. We're fighting it today. The paintings that I'm doing now are about that battle. The paintings came out of the time when the newspapers went colour. When newspapers go colour, it's almost like you get information overload and image overload. Newspapers are about facts and truth, and you believe you get a true view of the world from these images when you don't: they're completely fake.

HUO Which paintings are you referring to?

DH The realistic ones I've been doing. Like the ones in the Gagosian show this autumn. It's like taking one of those images and trying to make it into a painting, because paintings you believe and images you don't, so you want to throw away the images. What's happened though, is that we believe in images.

HUO How are these paintings made? Are they done by people who work with you, like in Warhol's Factory?

DH For two years I worked with a sculptor called Nick Lumb. I was giving him these little photographic images and saying, 'I want it to look like that.' But I didn't really know what I wanted. We didn't get any results - well, we did, but they were horrible. We were trying to do it with airbrushing. I kept going back to these paintings and hating them. And after all the airbrushing, after two or three years, we just went back to oil paint. When you've learnt all that discipline, the oil paint really cracks back in. They're still not there, but all I know is they're getting better. They're getting closer to what I want. I've been setting up my own photographs. I've taken photographs of diamonds. I've been doing photographs of the Beatles; just creating this mass of images that keep piling up. But it's real chaos because I don't know what I want. I keep stopping and starting. I keep thinking about Goya and Soutine, and I sort of imagine that at the end of my life I'll just fucking paint. I'll be fucking sat in a tiny little room with one light bulb doing self-portraits on my own. There's a lot of complications with what I do now. You have to be young, you have to be fit, to run the operation that I run, and I certainly don't think I can get old running an operation like this.

HUO So the operation will have to reduce?

DH Yes. It will have to. If you've got people working for you, and they're getting older and you keep replacing them with younger people, and you're getting old too, it's going to be mental. But if you keep everybody working for you and they get old, eventually they're not going to be able to move big things around. So instead of getting rid of them younger, why not make the works smaller? You could make smaller things that they can carry. You'd end up with this fucking studio of old people carrying little things around - 'Can you make it in wood, please? I can't carry the steel.' It would be good if you could do that. I love the idea of a company, an old-fashioned company. I'm just an old-fashioned boy at heart, really.

HUO In some ways it does feel like a new model of Warhol's Factory. But this idea of revisiting painting is interesting. You could get rid of all these structures without concentrating on painting. Why painting?

DH It's like, 'Why books?' It's just a great way to convey a message. It's a brilliant illusion. It's very simple; the illusion that something two-dimensional is three-dimensional evokes emotions in people.

HUO You mentioned that you're doing a new show and a book of the drawings in New York.

DH It's called 'I've just sent 300 drawings over to Larry Gagosian, so it's kind of everything I've done. When I started doing the drawings, I didn't really want anybody to see them. But as I've been doing it for longer and have got older, I think maybe it's good to see them.

HUO Is there a daily practice of drawing?

DH Yes, it's the first point of call, isn't it? You have an idea, and when it gets too complicated to hold in your head, it's a great way to visualise it. It's a very cheap and effective way to visualise it. I love that. You can work out what size it needs to be. You can imagine it. So I've always done that. I can work out in a few lines with a pencil on a piece of paper how big I need to make a tank. That way, you don't make expensive mistakes.

HUO Peter Fleissig showed me the drawing of the shark.

DH That was done after the fact. Peter said he wanted a drawing of the shark, so I did one. I think you can tell if they're done afterwards because you can see they're drawn from a photograph of the piece.

HUO Are the drawings after the fact rare, or are there lots of them?

DH I think as long as you don't pretend that they're done before, it's OK. If someone said to me, 'Can you do me a drawing of the shark?' I don't mind doing that. But the ones done before are more interesting, because you're trying out different possibilities and you can see the progress of how you got to the actual shark.

HUO Are there a lot of unknown drawings in the show that nobody has ever seen before?

DH Yes, there are lots. There are some drawings of horrible sculptures that never got made. There's one called 'Lambie Loves Snoodle'. It's got a pram in it and a baby monitor with a skull; it's the very stupid idea of death talking to birth on a baby walkie-talkie or a mobile phone. The title was from a Lonely Hearts column.

HUO That piece was never made?

DH No. I don't think it ever will be. There are lots like that. Loads. When you have an idea for an animal in formaldehyde, you do drawings for every animal. I was going to do a big Raft of the Medusa with dead animals and meat and big butchers' tables, but I never made it. There's a great one of a butterfly made out of two pigs sewn together ass to ass; you cut the back end off it and then four sides of beef make the wings. It's a huge thing, like a butterfly of death, which I never made. You do drawings very quickly, and that's easy, but then you work out how much it's going to cost to make it and it becomes a ridiculous amount of money.

HUO There was this whole debate in the press the other day. People were asking about the shark: how will it be in the future? Does it matter if it's a different shark? Does it matter whether or not you, as the artist, choose the shark? Can someone else make it?

DH The idea of replacing the shark is a bit of a difficult one. The original shark (in ' The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living') was done badly - that's the problem. With the other ones, you probably won't replace them. Everything is replaceable in my mind, but then, I'm not the person who's going to decide that, because it happens when you're gone. But I feel pretty bad about the way the shark was looking, because it's deteriorated. A shark has got to look fierce. So I think it really had stopped doing what I wanted it to do. The problem with the shark was that it was done with MoMA and it was done with Charles Saatchi; there were too many people doing it and they all got involved with the commission. Different people advised them that there was no need to inject the shark. I wanted to inject the shark, they didn't want to inject it - Charles can be a bit bullish - and they pushed me into not injecting it. So in the end, it didn't get injected, and it was the only thing that didn't get injected. Then we had all the stories that it had started floating; it completely rotted insider, and we had some real problems with it. In the end, Charles went off on his own and had it gutted and skinned and stretched over a fibreglass mould, so it wasn't a real shark after a while, and it just started to be totally wrong: it was the wrong shape, it just didn't look frightening, didn't look dangerous, didn't look like a shark. So for me to get involved at this point now, knowing what I know, I can go back in and get a new shark and make it look exactly like I wanted it to look originally because I'm still alive, so I think that's good. But that's an example of an artwork being handled really badly. It's not like the 'Venus de Milo'. The arm is missing - it looks great. With old art you've got to use a lot of imagination. In a way there's a big joy in looking at things and reconstructing their past lives. I mean, every day you have to deal with your own mortality, so a good way of doing that without too much fear is to deal with the mortality of an object.

HUO Some artists in the 1960s tried to make contracts stating that a work had to be dealt with in a particular way. That was another part of my question: how do you feel about that difficult business?

DH I don't mind. There are two things in an artwork, aren't there? There's a visual thing and there's a cerebral thing; there's a mind thing and an eye thing going on. And then mind thing is always secondary; no matter how great or important conceptual art is, at the end of the day, it's secondary to the eye thing. If it looks fucking good on the wall, none of that matters; it's really not important. But I think you've got to be careful. When you're making an artwork, there's an idea and you play around with it and then it comes to life. But you can have an idea and put things together, and then it doesn't work. So I suppose if things can come to life then they can also die. You can create an artwork, and it comes to life, but then maybe 500 years later it dies. I've never really thought about that. It's a weird thought; a good thought.

HUO A limited lifespan? Like buildings.

DH Yes, like everything else. In my mind I think that art's immortal, but maybe it has a limited lifespan. All these Old Masters are falling apart, and we're clinging onto them through preservation. It's like in that film of HG Wells' 'The Time Machine', when the books fall apart in his hands. You'll get that happening with art, I guess. With a Jackson Pollock painting that's going to happen eventually. Or is it? You can create it digitally. Maybe art is like true love; maybe it never dies. That's my hope, anyway. But it will die with the world. If we do nothing, the earth is going to smash into the sun, so we're fucked really.

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Hans Ulrich Obrist You often work in series. Damien Hirst I've always liked series. I remember looking at Robert Motherwell's painting when I was young. Do you know 'Splashes by the Sea'? I thought that was great. You get some sort of security from the repetition of a series.

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Damien Hirst (b.1965) is a British contemporary artist. His varied practice explores the complex relationships between art, religion, science, life and death.

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▷ Artsper | Buy Original Art Online - Artworks: Paintings, Photos and More

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Of French origin, Laurence JENKELL born in 1965 is an artist in her own right. At the same time painter, plastic artist and sculptor, the Artist entered for nearly ten years with force and brilliance in the World of Contemporary Art. It is in her workshops that she reinvents the processes of transformation of materials, turns towards crystallization and creates by drawing inspiration from current influences and trends in fashion, design and our consumer society. One of his sources of inspiration: candy. More than a medium, the candy interpreted by Laurence JENKELL becomes a "language" A specialist discourse would say that his candy sculpture is a radical gesture resulting from the semantic content of Pop Art and New Realism. A secular discourse would speak of an artistic gluttony which delights our senses and which by its evoked sweetness makes it possible to magnify all the subjects carried by these candies. In different forms, materials and colors, the Artist never ceases to surprise us and arouse our curiosity. An enchanted world, colorful, tangy, to amaze the eyes of young and old alike. Almost living sculptures awakening the sense of smell, taste and touch.

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▷ Laurence Jenkell | Buy Original Art Online | Artsper

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Of French origin, Laurence JENKELL born in 1965 is an artist in her own right. At the same time painter, plastic artist and sculptor, the Artist entered for nearly ten years with force and brilliance in the World of Contemporary Art.

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Focusing on the aspect of making something with care, or something symbolizing care.
DUE: April 7

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5,655 Nails Used
25" x 36"
Total Hours 85

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What the Material Knows Sculpture (Nails)

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2 1/2"
2"
1 1/2"
1"

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On my way to Günther Uecker's (b. 1930) studio in Düsseldorf, I manage to lose my way, and when I ask for directions a helpful passerby points past a twisting trio of Frank Gehry buildings and says, 'Take a right at Uecker Platz.' Günther Uecker may have the honour of having a whole square christened after him, but he's not a grand figure. When I finally get to the studio, the artist himself greets me at the door of his huge, two-storey converted warehouse on the banks of the Rhine. (Uecker has been based here since 1987, when he moved out of the space he used to share with Gerhard Richter.) He is instantly recognisable from the slew of recent publications that chart the happenings of the 1960s and in which he invariably appears wearing overalls, with close-cropped hair - often pictured with other avant-garde luminaries such as Yayoi Kusama, or John Cage, or staring intently into the camera of Lothar Wolleh.

Upstairs are Uecker's projects, which include canvases large and small as well as an array of tools, a chair covered in spikes and much stranger contraptions, such as a typewriter featuring nails for keys. Nails are the German artist's signature material - but Uecker is more than comfortable using them for their usual purpose. 'I built all of this,' he says proudly, referring to the internal partition walls and columns, as well as the artworks around us. But when I ask him if he has really, as it's sometimes said, used 100 tonnes of nails in the course of his career, he laughs at me. I walk carefully so as not to disturb the careful arrangements on the floor of his many publications and the works that document his extensive travels - he has just returned from Iran. It's hard to take in the sheer variety of his work as, at pace, he guides me through a 60-year career marked by imaginative collaborations and constant reinvention.

In recent years, it has been for his work with the avant-garde ZERO group for which Uecker has attracted the most attention. In Germany he has had regular showings at the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin, most recently in 2015, and his work features in the ZERO exhibition at the LVR-LandesMuseum Bonn (until 26 March). He has also taken part in major exhibitions at US museums, most notably in the comprehensive 'ZERO: Countdown to Tomorrow, 1950s-60s' at New York's Guggenheim in 2014. These have sought to map the network of relationships that characterised contemporary practice in the post-war period, placing ZERO firmly in the centre of things and redrawing the mental map of the art world in the process.

ZERO, the movement with which Uecker is most closely associated, has always been hard to classify. It began with a pair of Düsseldorf artists - Heinz Mack and Otto Piene (Uecker would join a little later) but grew into a sprawling intercontinental movement that reads like a Who's Who of the post-war avant-garde; it drew in everyone from Yves Klein, Jean Tinguely, Lucio Fontana, and Piero Manzoni, to Yayoi Kusama and the Gutai group. More confusing still, many of its members are known for their involvement with other movements, which have already taken their place within the pantheon of modern art - minimalism, Nouveau Realism, Arte Povera, Op Art, and Land Art.

Despite this complexity, the recent scholarly attention paid to the group has also led to interest from the international art market: a 2010 sale of works by ZERO artists at Sotheby's, London set 19 auction records, while at Art Basel in 2014, a group of eight white paintings by Uecker sold for more than five million euros to a European foundation. In 2016 Uecker had his first London show in 50 years, 'Günther Uecker: Verletzte Felder (Wounded Fields)', at Lévy Gorvy.

The fields in the London exhibition's title are an apt description for Uecker's oeuvre, since he often creates surfaces from which nails sprout like wheat, casting intricate patterns of shadows with their battered heads. Pointing to a canvas covered in welt-like patches of nails and leaning against a wall, he says, 'These are like the marks you have from injuries...scars.' The roots of this strange crop, Uecker explains, lie in the fertile soil of his childhood in Fischland (literally 'fish land'), a narrow spit of land between the Baltic and a chain of shallow, brackish lagoons that shadow the coast in the north of Mecklenburg. Uecker says, 'The inspiration for my work comes from nature - my father was a farmer and I still believe our purpose in life is to bring the fruit from the earth.'

During the war, the town of Wustrow in Fischland became a testing ground for the Luftwaffe. 'I remember the smell of all the lacquer and other materials for the aeroplanes, and on the other hand the ground, the smell of the earth and the animals we had. It was a wonderful combination of contrasts,' Uecker says. Some of his memories of that time are much grimmer. In May 1945, just days before the German surrender, the prison ship Cap Arcona with 5,000 people on board was sunk by British bombers. 'Bodies from the ships washed up on the coast, and were left there splayed out, rotting on the beach. They were mostly prisoners from the concentration camps,' he says, tracing stripes with his fingers across his torso. 'The Russians soldiers came and made me and two other boys bury them. They were like mummies after months in the sun.' The grim task proved a moment of awakening for the young German. 'I became more sensitive, to possess an empathy for those losing their lives, and so I became determined to live life with intensity.'

After the war, Uecker's family's farmland was appropriated under the GDR regime and the young (now) East German trained as a propaganda artist until 1953, when he moved to West Berlin after the June Uprising. There he studied painting at the art school in Berlin-Weißensee. In 1955, after being interrogated and processed through a refugee camp for juvenile male refugees from the GDR, Uecker moved to the Rhineland to study. Düsseldorf was an apt choice for the aspiring artist: the city has been in the grip of the arts ever since the 1690s, when the Elector Palatine, Duke Johann Wilhelm II, built a gallery to placate his homesick Florentine wife, Anna Maria Luisa - the last Medici. Meanwhile, the Staatliche Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where Paul Klee taught in the 1930s, remains one of the most revered art schools in Europe.

By the time Uecker enrolled at the Akademie, the city was beginning to recover some of its Weimar verve. While Uecker studied under his idol, the Communist and former condemned degenerate artist Otto Pankok, his classmates at the Akademie included Joseph Beuys and Günter Grass (whose 1959 masterpiece the Tin Drum evokes the spirit of the city at this time). As Uecker says, 'Düsseldorf was not Prussian like Berlin - Protestant and fascistic. It was near to the West, to Paris, Amsterdam, and Antwerp. It felt to me as though I were passing over the Limes Germanicus, the border the Romans built on the Rhine, away from the dark woods and into civilisation.' In 1956-57 Uecker created his first nail paintings, Malereiumnagelung and Das gelbe Bild, when he began to 'over-nail' painting he had been working on. 'Coming from East Germany, where I had been educated about the Russian Revolution of 1917, I was thinking about Vladimir Mayakovsky's declaration that "poetry is made with a hammer".'

In the same year, two former students of the Akademie, Heinz Mack and Otto Piene, decided to hold a series of exhibitions of their own work in their studio and began to invite other artists to exhibit alongside them. Yves Klein, who was showing 'Yves, Propositions monochromes' at the Schmela Galerie in the city, quickly became involved. 'ZERO', the name Mack and Piene chose for their burgeoning collective, was inspired by the countdown to a rocket launch and reflected the group's fascination with technology and with kinetic art. It also hinted at rebirth, 1945, after all, was commonly described as Stunde Null, Germany's 'zero hour'.

Piene, Mack, and Klein published the magazine ZERO 1 in April 1958 and by October of that year, a group of seven or eight affiliated artists exhibited and published ZERO 2. 'In 1958, Mack invited me to the first exhibition "Das Rote Bild", as he did Klein and Fontana,' says Uecker of the casual way in which the group grew. Uecker was later to take an organising role in the movement but at that point, he says, he was just like any of the other artists in the expanded network.

Klein's advocacy of monochrome works was enthusiastically taken up not just by Mack, Piene, and Uecker but by a number of other like-minded young artists. These ZERO artists and other affiliated groups, such as the Dutch Nul and Azimuth in Italy, made paintings with fire, smoke, mirrors, dynamos, or even by destroying their canvases. Piene wrote at the time, ' Wir sind fur alles ': we are in favour of everything. In the summer of 1958 Klein met and fell in love with Uecker's sister, Rotraut, who went on to became his assistant, 'living paint brush', and eventually his wife. The match, which lasted until Klein's premature death in 1962, proved another tie binding the Düsseldorf artists to the rest of the European avant-garde. 'Manzoni was always in and out of my house - and Christo was actually living there,' Uecker recalls. 'My studio was open to all the artists, we were all very close - Tinguely too. It was an important time, and I was only 30.'

ZERO was becoming ever more successful and Uecker's role in the group was formalised when he was brought in to help organise their exhibition at the Stedelijk in 1961. For this Mack and Piene created their collaborative work, Salon de Lumière, a piece that channels the same fascination with light and movement evident in Uecker's piece Fünf Lichtscheiben, Kosmische Vision (1961-81), a configuration of five rotating disks with nailed surfaces, like an interplanetary alignment. 'Mack and Piene were teachers,' Uecker explains, 'and had to work in the mornings so I organised the transport and customs for the Stedelijk exhibition as well as the exhibition in San Marino [the San Marino Biennale], where we received the first prize.'

The movement continued to gather momentum and to attract more and more artists, often from places where the establishment, art-historical or otherwise, was discredited. 'When we looked at our parents and the neighbours,' Uecker says, 'we thought they were all murderers, they had been responsible for the war. Young people then were very free, we felt we could do it all.'

In June 1964 Piene, Mack, and Uecker presented their collectively-realised light room, Hommage à Fontana, at Documenta 3 in Kassel. In September of that year, before a show at Howard Wise's kinetic art gallery in New York, tensions began to surface when Mack wrote to Piene that 'The ship zero is casting its anchor, and the voyage is over.' Success made it increasingly difficult for Uecker, as well, to devote as much time to ZERO as he had before. In 1965 he took part in 'The Responsive Eye' at MoMA - a wildly succesful show credited with popularising Op Art.

I ask Uecker what he thinks about the prevailing critical view that ZERO was a reaction against Abstract Expressionism, a riposte to American cultural hegemony: 'That's a mere interpretation, that's not true. Having said that, the artists in America were very nervous. Rauschenberg, for example, said: "I made a monochrome work before Yves Klein," and I remember the New York Times described me as "This Nazi kid who looks like he has fallen down from the sky." America was so conservative at this time, when I went over to New York, the women were all in furs and the men in black suits and ties, and polished shoes! Everyone looked like bankers.'

ZERO came to an end with a final show in Bonn at the turn of 1966, to which Uecker contributed his piece New York Dancer I, a whirling construction consisting of a human-sized tree trunk draped with white duck cloth from which nails hung, chattering as the machine gyrated. Uecker has described it as 'a parable for a person who feels an apparent freedom, but is turning in a circle [...]I was in New York at that time, ZERO had become a success [...] I had to separate myself from it to have the possibility to take risks in my life from day to day.'

Nevertheless, the artists continued to collaborate, most notably in the creation of the influential Creamcheese club, a multipurpose venue inspired by Warhol's multimedia live performance experiment, the Exploding Plastic Inevitable. The Creamcheese opened its doors in July 1967 in Düsseldorf's Old Town. Here Uecker and Mack staged works beside Richter and Adolf Luther, while the bar was staffed by Blinky Palermo and Katharina Sieverding. Meanwhile, an array of televisions behind the bar broadcast live images of performances held in the back by Joseph Beuys and Kraftwerk.

In 1968, at the Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, Uecker's John Cage-inspired Terror Orchestra brought the noise of industry and machine tools into the museum. Uecker and Gerhard Richter 'stormed' and 'occupied' this same space later that year. In 1970, Uecker represented Germany at the Venice Biennale and four years later he became Professor of Free Art at the academy in Düsseldorf. Uecker has hardly been short of success, but he is still wary of its effects. 'Don't join the establishment,' he says to me at one point, drumming the table for emphasis. But establishment recognition of the artist has led to some intriguing and politically charged projects. In 1998, he was chosen to design a prayer room for the Reichstag: 'When I went to Mount Athos, I had the sense that everywhere in the world, no matter what the faith, people pray and if nobody prays in the world then we are in danger,' he warns, before adding ' Dann ist die welt verloren ' (then the world is lost).

Last summer, the artist returned to where he grew up. For a piece called Wustrow Tücher (2016), he covered the beach with white shrouds, one for each burial in 1945, which he then painted. It brought to mind Sandmühle (1970), a piece he conceived while working towards the pioneering 'Earth Art' exhibition at Cornell University. It comprised two booms silently rotating around a central pivot in a pile of sand, each scoring the sand deeper and deeper over time. 'Art,' Uecker declared at the time 'is like the traces of wounds plowed into the field.' But despite his fixation on scars and wounding and his worries for the future, Uecker remains essentially optimistic and outward-looking. As he says, 'The greatest danger in the world is anger.'
'ZERO ist gut für Dich: Mack, Piene, Uecker in Bonn 1966/2016' is at the LVR-LandesMuseum Bonn from 26 November 2016-26 March. From the February issue of Apollo: preview and subscribe here

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Examining the scars of history with Günther Uecker | Apollo Magazine

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On my way to Günther Uecker's (b. 1930) studio in Düsseldorf, I manage to lose my way, and when I ask for directions a helpful passerby points past a twisting trio of Frank Gehry buildings and says, 'Take a right at Uecker Platz.'

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s.750 hanging open form with four fluted edges

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Untitled S750 Hanging Open Form with Four Fluted Edges by RuthAsawa

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View Untitled, S.750 Hanging Open Form with Four Fluted Edges by Ruth Asawa on artnet. Browse upcoming and past auction lots by Ruth Asawa.

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Günther Uecker Studio, Düsseldorf, Germany, 2019. Courtesy: © 2019 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn; photograph: Ivo Faber

Whatever you are doing right now, there is a good chance that Günther Uecker is hammering. Now almost 90 years old (he was born in 1930) the German artist still works seven days a week, up to six hours a day. He would otherwise go mad, he says. Other people retire or take vacations. He pounds nails.

When Uecker first began working this way, in the early 1960s, it meant a certain thing. He was, along with Heinz Mack and Otto Piene, a core member of the ZERO Group, which pursued austere, materially intense abstraction. They had connections to like-minded Italians, such as Enrico Castellani and Piero Manzoni, and to Barnett Newman in New York. Uecker saw what they were doing in terms of existentialism: each of his nails marked an irreducible point in time and space, like Newman's famous 'zips'.

Günther Uecker, Doppelspirale "Both", 2019, nails and white paint on canvas on wood, 2 × 1.6 m. Courtesy: © 2019 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn; photograph: Ivo Faber

As art moved on, Uecker kept to his own devices. His nail-covered paintings and sculptures were reinterpreted as the time suited: first as Op Art, their shadow-patterns shifting with one's viewing angle, then as the products of performances, their meaning derived from Uecker's sheer endurance and physicality. Uecker accepts these various interpretations, to a point. Yet his primary concerns have always been elsewhere, in a domain that deserves the name of religion. It's possible to think of his work as Christian allegory - the stigmata of Jesus's crucifixion, arrows piercing Saint Sebastian - but inadequate. Uecker is after something less dogmatic and more transcendent than that: ultimately, he wants to escape not just art history, but history itself.

Günther Uecker, Wolken, 1992, watercolour on handmade paper, 16 × 19 cm. Courtesy: © 2019 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn; photograph: Ivo Faber

This ambition comes across powerfully in Uecker's current exhibition at Lévy Gorvy, which for the first time juxtaposes his nail paintings - those on view all completed in the past six months - and watercolour landscapes, rendered on his far-flung travels. It's quite a contrast. The nail paintings are big, dense, seismic, with Twombly-like graphite scrawls nearly obscured by twisting gyres of metal. They ache with the force of incessant labour; you can almost hear them bang. The watercolours, on the other hand, are quiet and slight in the extreme. Uecker declares them something other than finished works: 'notations', fleeting impressions of the natural world.

Yet the two bodies of work have much in common. Uecker's watercolours are extremely repetitive, with each composition used over and over, perhaps hundreds of times. They manifest the combined struggle and joy that is the essence of meditative practice. It is as if the artist were a human radio antenna, trying to tune into forces beyond human reckoning. He describes one series, inspired by the deserts of Israel, as an attempt to 'wrestle with the Leviathan.' At another moment, standing in front of some of his lyrical, painterly abstractions, he mentions the old adage: 'When an angel passes, you do not see it. You only feel its wings.'

Günther Uecker, Schauer, 2019, nails and white paint on canvas on wood, 2 × 1.6 m. Courtesy: © 2019 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn; photograph: Ivo Faber

There is absolutely nothing fashionable about Günther Uecker. His idea of art as a cosmic practice may feel like something from the past, when artist-heroes grappled with essential truths on our behalf. Yet there is profound humility in the way he steps into his studio each day with the tools of a carpenter, and little else. He often says that he thinks of himself as a 'medium' rather than a messenger, so it would be wrong to relegate him to a certain movement or moment. It was Nietzsche who proposed the idea of 'philosophizing with a hammer'. But it was Uecker who turned to me, in the middle of touring me through his exhibition, and said this: 'time, you know, is a mistake.'
'Günther Uecker: Notations' continues at Lévy Gorvy, New York, USA, until 25 January 2020.

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Whatever you are doing right now, there is a good chance that Günther Uecker is hammering. Now almost 90 years old (he was born in 1930) the German artist still works seven days a week, up to six hours a day. He would otherwise go mad, he says.

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Group Zero or Group O are often referred to simply as Zero. They formed in Dusseldorf in 1957, in reaction to the subjective character of the prevailing tachisme or art informel. Zero felt their approach to art making which used light and motion opened up new forms of perception.

The group was formed by Otto Piene and Heinz Mack. They were joined in 1960 by Gunther Uecker. There were a number of other artists who associated or exhibited with Zero, most notably Yves Klein and Jean Tinguely, as well as Pol Bury and Daniel Spoerri. The name refers to the countdown for a rocket launch and according to the group is meant to evoke 'a zone of silence [out of which develops] a new beginning'.

Three issues of a journal, Zero, were published, in April and October 1958 and July 1961. The group dissolved in 1966.

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Group Zero or Group O are often referred to simply as Zero. They formed in Dusseldorf in 1957, in reaction to the subjective character of the prevailing tachisme or art informel. Zero felt their approach to art making which used light and motion opened up new forms of perception.

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Günther Uecker is a German artist and member of the ZERO movement best known for his signature use of nails arranged into tactile, sculptural paintings. Following an interest in Eastern philosophies, Uecker's use of nails on canvas served as a meditative ritual, with the repetitive nature of hammering, transforming his theories into a lived artistic practice. First drawn to the Socialist Realism style of painting while studying in postwar Berlin, Uecker began creating reliefs in 1957. Born on March 13, 1930 in Wendorf, Germany, the artist met John Cage in 1959 who influenced the scope of his practice. In Uecker's later work, the artist merely initiates a project and allows it to be taken where it needs to go-wherever that may be, even if it eventually is out of his hands. In 1961, after joining the ZERO group alongside Heinz Mack and Otto Piene, Uecker expanded his practice to include audience participation. The artist currently lives and works in Düsseldorf, Germany. Uecker's works are held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., The Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, among others.

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Günther Uecker is a German artist and member of the ZERO movement best known for his signature use of nails arranged into tactile, sculptural paintings. View Günther Uecker's 3,479 artworks on artnet. Find an in-depth biography, exhibitions, original artworks for sale, the latest news, and sold auction prices.

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Ruth Asawa, Untitled | Modernisms 1900-1980 | Arts and humanities | Khan Academy

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Excerpts from RUTH ASAWA OF FORMS AND GROWTH

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Ruth Asawa’s Mesmerizing Art and Enduring Legacy | Artsy

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Best known for her large-scale and intricately woven sculptures and public art commissions, Asawa was a pillar of strength and a teacher to many.

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Focusing on the material, then concept
MATERIAL: Wire
DUE: Feb 24

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Due: Jan 20

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Switch to the box is the human body.Internally as well as externally.

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Japanese designer Oki Sato on his playful approach to design | Braun | British GQ

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Maquette of Wooden Box: View from Above 

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Maquette of Wooden Box: View from Above 

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Hand hole is 4" x 3"

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Height: 10"
Length: 10"
Depth: 10"

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ORIGINAL CONCEPT: Tactility & Materiality within a Box 

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ORIGINAL CONCEPT: Tactility & Materiality within a Box 

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HIGH TOUCH OBJECTS

Casted hand

Casted foot

Something that resembles human fat

Concept

Boxes act as a divide from the object and the audience, only one side is open and visible

Video of 3 people, they have to put their hand in the box and guess what they're touching.

The idea of the lack of human connection and connection to human body

Setting (?)

White sterile room

Subject all in black

Table is all white

Considering box to have another texture

2 cameras

One focused on reaction of subject

One on the subjects hand going into box

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cup saucer dejeuner en fourrure le déjeuner teacup art love object spoon oppenheim fur covered fur lined pablo picasso

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Accession II - Eva Hesse - Google Arts & Culture

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Google Arts & Culture features content from over 2,000 leading museums and archives, which have partnered with the Google Cultural Institute to bring the world's treasures online.