Hans-Peter Feldmann

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

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. 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.

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.

Feldmann made his first series of books between 1968 and 1971. 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.

Feldman'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. 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.

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