GÜNTHER UECKER: ARC OF LIGHT
Lévy Gorvy Dayan announces Günther Uecker’s monumental Lichtbogen paintings to New York with Arc of Light. The radiant paintings vibrate with the energy of their creation, embodying water and light.
April 11 - May 4
The presentation follows the debut of the series at Lévy Gorvy, Paris, in 2020. Lichtbogen constitutes a dramatic development in the German master’s eight-decade practice with an unprecedented, large-scale body of work. Collectively, the works on view find the artist mapping and translating the ever-changing experience of life around us. Arc of Light will mark the artist’s sixth solo exhibition with the gallery.
During the late spring of 2020, Uecker embarked on a series of blue-and-white paintings—five of which will be featured in New York—distinctive for their use of watercolor and paint on canvas on a grand scale. The medium of watercolor has long been an integral part of the artist’s oeuvre—usually employed, however, in small format works on paper during his frequent international travels—to convey his responses to specific landscapes through color and abstraction.
Returning to his Düsseldorf studio, the expansive Lichtbogen paintings followed as an enduring summation of his experiences at Hormuz. Uecker describes his inspiration in his poetic passage: “Over the clearance, / the visions of the Arabian / desert island shimmer / in the green waters, / waters shining in the / entire color spectrum, / visions of a biblical land, / a land of prophetic revelations. / An arc of light painted, / flowingly, on paper, / like a scar, a vein of life itself, / amid the rapture of the colors— / a line painted, / like an arch, / an arrow ascending out.”
With Lichtbogen, Uecker harnesses the clarity, fluidity, and brilliance of his chosen medium, as well as scale, to convey the ethereal quality of light and water. Through the resonance of the arc, evoked in the circular motion of his brushstrokes, these natural sources become the inspiration for, in Uecker’s own words, “painting, in jubilation / all that is wondrous / all that exists / in this world.”
Günther Uecker: Arc of Light coincides with Günther Uecker: Lichtbogen. Entwürfe zu Kirchenfenstern im Schweriner Dom, on view through June 2, 2024, at the Goethe Museum Düsseldorf. The exhibition presents, for the first time, 13 preparatory window designs Uecker created for the Schwerin Cathedral in Germany. Originating from the Lichtbogen paintings, the stained-glass windows—each measuring over ten meters high—will be fully installed in the cathedral by the fall of 2024.
There will be four windows in total realized in the Schwerin Cathedral based on four works from the series. The commission continues Uecker’s exploration of light and shadow in public spaces, including his 1998–99 collaboration with the German national parliament on a room for prayer and reflection in the Reichstag, Berlin. His Schwerin Cathedral project places his work in conversation with permanent chapel installations by Marc Chagall, Ellsworth Kelly, Louise Nevelson, Gerhard Richter, Mark Rothko, and Pierre Soulages.