Hans-Peter Feldmann (17 January 1941 – 24 May 2023) was a German visual artist. Feldmann's approach to art-making was one of collecting, ordering, and re-presenting.
Feldmann was born on 17 January 1941.[1] In the 1960s, Feldmann studied painting at the University of Arts and Industrial Design LinzinAustria. 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. In 1979 Feldmann decided to pull out of the art world and just make books and pictures for himself. In 1989 the curator Kasper König persuaded Feldmann to exhibit in a gallery again.[2]
Feldmann died on 24 May 2023, at the age of 82.[3]
Feldmann was a figure in the conceptual art movement and practitioner in the artist book and multiple formats. Feldmann's approach to art-making was one of collecting, ordering, and re-presenting amateur snapshots, print photographic reproductions, toys, and trivial works of art. Feldmann reproduced and recontextualized our reading of them in books, postcards, posters or multiples.[2]
Feldmann made his first series of books between 1968 and 1971. His 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.[4]
Feldmann's photographic essays might have a more intimate singularity in book form. His book 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.[4] Another book, “1967-1993 Die Toten” reproduces images from newspapers of all of the lives lost due to the violence and terrorism that permeated that period of contemporary German history.[5]
Creating carefully conceived installations from everyday images is what Feldmann is best known for. In 2004–2005 MoMA P.S. 1 showed “100 Years,” an exhibition of work by Feldmann composed 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 12 September 2001.[6]
Feldmann was named winner of the eighth Biennal Hugo Boss Prize in 2010. This prize included an exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, in May 2011.[7]
Feldmann's work features in prominent private and public collections, such as that of the Fotomuseum Winterthur and the MACBA in Barcelona. In 2012, the artist donated one of his key works, Die Toten (The Dead), to the Berlin State Museums in Berlin.[8]
Feldmann was represented by Mehdi Chouakri Gallery in Berlin, Simon Lee Gallery in London, Galerie Francesca Pia in Zürich, Galerie Martine Aboucaya in Paris, and the 303 Gallery in New York. He did not limit the number of editions of his works, nor did he sign them.[2][9]
