German artist Günther Uecker, known for a spiritual approach to art and for employing nails as a sculptural material, died on Tuesday at 95. German news agency dpa reported that his family confirmed that the artist died at a hospital in Düsseldorf, where he lived. No cause of death was indicated.

“Few artists have put the common nail to such varied expressive use as Günther Uecker,” wrote Roberta Smith in the New York Times in 2011, on the occasion of a survey of his works at New York gallery L&M Arts. He took inspiration, she wrote, “from Kandinsky’s cosmic abstractions and Vladimir Mayakovsky’s injunction that, ‘Poetry is made with a hammer.’”

Born March 13, 1930, in Wendorf, Germany, Uecker studied painting at the Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weissensee and then continued his studies under Otto Pangkok at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. He explored various faiths in the 1950s, including Buddhism, Taoism, and Islam. His meditative work with nails grew partly out of an interest in purification rituals including Gregorian chant. By the late ‘50s, he was integrating nails into his work, and soon would add corks and cardboard tubes to his arsenal.

A Christie’s employee looks at Spirale II by Günther Uecker. Photo: Dominic Lipinski/PA Images via Getty Images.

He joined the Zero Group, created by artists Heinz Mack and Otto Piene, in 1961. The group’s name reflected a desire to return art to a “zero base.” In this, Uecker was partly inspired by a meeting with the American composer John Cage. The group was the subject of the 2014 exhibition “Zero: Countdown to Tomorrow, 1950s–60s” at New York’s Guggenheim Museum.

Uecker drove nails not only into painting-like surfaces, but also items such as pianos, chairs, and television sets. After the Zero Group disbanded in 1966, he would work in various modes, including Conceptual art, Land Art, and body art, and designed sets for several operas. In 2000, he designed a prayer room for the rebuilt Reichstag, the lower house of parliament, in Berlin. 

“The progress of the shadow that forms is also connected with the feeling that as each day passes, one yields to the embrace of night until the next morning and that terrible moment when I, as an individual, cast a shadow of my own and find myself alone in the universe,” the artist said, as quoted by gallery Axel Vervoordt (Antwerp and Hong Kong), which shows his work. “It was that same existential terror that prompted me to make works that render visible the never-ending movement that is only halted for the short moment when a nail is hit.”

“I’ve always admired Günther for his wisdom, his unparalleled dedication to his work and his devotion to Zero,” said Vervoodt in a statement to Artnet News. “Günther explained to me that the use of nails was in memory of his father, who hammered the windows of their house with nails during the War in an act of protection and love for his family. Since then, I started seeing his work in a different way and I loved it.”

Gunther Uecker poses in front of one of his artworks during an exhibition in Jakarta in 2005. Photo: Adek Berry/AFP via Getty Images.

Uecker was featured in many major international exhibitions, including Documenta 4, Kassel, Germany (1968) and the Venice Biennale (1970). Institutional solo shows included one at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf (1983), a retrospective at the Kunsthalle der Hypo-Kulturstiftung, Munich (1990), and another at the Ulmer Museum, Ulm, Germany (2010). He taught at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf from 1974 to 1995. 

His work appears in numerous international museums, including the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Guggenheim in New York; and Tate Modern, London.

Hendrik Wüst, the governor of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, whose capital is Düsseldorf, called Uecker “one of the most important and influential artists in German postwar history” and said that he influenced subsequent generations and “contributed to an open and dynamic society.”