Hans Peter Feldmann Biography
Hans Peter Feldmann (1941 - ) was born in Düsseldorf, Germany, in 1941. He studied painting at the University of Arts and Industrial Design Linz in Austria. In the late 1960s, he began producing artists' books which he titled Bilde (Picture), which would appear in his practice for years to come. In 2010, Feldmann received the Hugo Boss Prize, which included a subsequent exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2011. His works are held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, The Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin, among others. Feldmann still lives and works in Düsseldorf, Germany. He is a compulsive collector and appropriates found images and everyday ephemera. His works have an aesthetic and conceptual simplicity. An interest in the formal language of typology plays out in pictorial assemblages of the overlooked and the banal; strawberries, shoes, women sitting in paintings, lips, kitsch floral photographs. His witty play with traditional aesthetics sees collections of classical paintings of nudes and portraits daubed with black crosses, red noses and squinty eyes. Feldmann intentionally circumvents the rules of the art market and high culture by creating unsigned, undated works and unlimited editions. Likewise, his artworks and exhibitions remain untitled, thus allowing the works to speak for themselves. In doing so he resists commodification and commercialization, making his work purely about the value of the art itself. He is of the democratic belief that art cannot be owned and that it is purely the spectator's personal experience of the work that generates its value.
