Hans-Peter Feldmann

Hans-Peter Feldman (Born 1941 Hilden, Germany) Lives and works in Dusseldorf. Conceptualist Feldmann earned an insider's reputation in Europe during the late 1960s and early 1970s for his understated play with books, photographs and found materials. Feldmann wants to undermine the myth of the artist as genius, and introduces everyday objects into his art. There are no originals in his work; his objects, books and magazines, photos and posters are unlimited, unsigned editions.

The artist Hans-Peter Feldmann is a major figure in the conceptual art movement and a pre-eminent practitioner in the artist book and multiple formats. Feldmann's approach to art-making is one of collecting, ordering and re-presenting. Culling imagery from the swollen vernacular of 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. These gestures create inventories documenting the ephemeral aspects and unattended moments that in the end make up our everyday existence.

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. Feldmann recognizes the problematic nature of pictures and art in a culture inundated by images. His specialty has been to heighten an appreciation of these images, to bring some order of understanding to them by removing them from the ordinary, day-to-day context in which they are first experienced.

KEN JOHNSON from the New York Times August 4, 2000 writes:

Photographs Taken From Hotel Room Windows While Traveling, a recently completed piece, 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, the show's most physically substantial yet most oblique work, 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.

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. There is a mercurial, mildly amusing poetry in all this, but none of it is very startling at this point in history. Mr. Feldman's photographic essays might have a more intimate singularity in book form. The one book on view -- Secret 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.

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  Hans-Peter Feldman
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  Birgit book cover