Hans-Peter Feldmann

Hans-Peter Feldmann (born 1941 in Hilden) is a German visual artist. Feldmann's approach to art-making is one of collecting, ordering and re-presenting.

Contents

Early life and career

In the 1960s, Feldmann studied painting at the University of Arts and Industrial Design Linz in Austria. He began working in 1968, producing the first of the small handmade books that would become a signature part of his work. These modest books, simply entitled Bilde (Picture) or Bilder (Pictures), would include one or more reproductions from a certain type--knees of women, shoes, chairs, film stars, etc.--their subjects isolated in their ubiquity and presented without captions.

Work

Hans-Peter Feldmann is a figure in the conceptual art movement and practitioner in the artist book and multiple formats. Feldmann's approach to art-making is one of collecting, ordering and re-presenting amateur snapshots, print photographic reproductions, toys and trivial works of art. Feldmann reproduces and recontextualizes our reading of them in books, postcards, posters or multiples.

Works from the early 1970s include 70 snapshots depicting All the Clothes of a Woman and four Time Series projects including, for example, a row of 36 pictures of a ship moving along a river. Feldmann's series Photographs Taken From Hotel Room Windows While Traveling clusters 108 nondescript, unframed snapshots of buildings, streets and parking lots. (Like other Feldmann projects, this calls to mind Ed Ruscha's photographic catalogs.) 11 Left Shoes presents 11 shoes borrowed from 303 Gallery employees, in a row on the floor. Que Sera has the words of the song of that title handwritten on the wall. Bed With Photograph simulates part of a hotel room with a slept-in bed, a side table and a framed photograph of a woman in leopard-print pants.[1]

Feldman's photographic essays might have a more intimate singularity in book form. His bookSecret Picturebook (1973) -- is a thick, densely printed, scholarly tome with little pictures of women's torsos in sexy underwear inserted at intervals. It most pointedly embodies the artist's mischievous relationship to high culture.[2] Another book, “1967-1993 Die Toten” reproduces images from newspapers of all of the lives lost due to the violence and terrorism that permeated contemporary German history.[3]

Creating carefully conceived installations from everyday images is what Feldmann is best known for. In 2004-5 MoMA P.S. 1 showed “100 Years,” an exhibition made up of 101 photographic portraits of people ages 8 months to 100 years. And at the International Center of Photography in 2008 he filled a room with the framed front pages of 100 newspapers — from New York, Paris, Dubai, Sydney, Seoul and elsewhere — printed on Sept. 12, 2001.[4]

Hans Peter Feldmann is represented by Simon Lee Gallery in London, Galerie Martine Aboucaya in Paris and 303 Gallery in New York.

Recognition

Hans-Peter Feldmann has been named winner of the eighth Biennal Hugo Boss Prize in 2010. This prize includes an exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, in May 2011.[5]

Exhibitions

Survey exhibitions

Publications (selected)

References

  1. ^ Johnson, Ken (2000-08-04). "ART IN REVIEW - ART IN REVIEW; Hans-Peter Feldmann - Review - NYTimes.com". New York Times. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=950CE3DA143CF937A3575BC0A9669C8B63. Retrieved 2010-01-07. 
  2. ^ Johnson, Ken (2000-08-04). "ART IN REVIEW - ART IN REVIEW; Hans-Peter Feldmann - Review - NYTimes.com". New York Times. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=950CE3DA143CF937A3575BC0A9669C8B63. Retrieved 2010-01-07. 
  3. ^ Hans-Peter Feldmann, November 13 2004 - January 8 2005 303 Gallery, New York.
  4. ^ Carol Vogel (April 28, 2011), Artist’s Guggenheim Show: 100,000 $1 Bills on the Wall New York Times.
  5. ^ Vogel, Carol (2010-11-04). "German Artist Wins $100,000 Prize". New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/05/arts/design/05vogel.html. Retrieved 2010-11-04. 
  6. ^ Contempary Art Daily

External links