Hans-Peter Feldmann. Art Exhibition

Hans-Peter Feldmann (Düsseldorf, 1941) is one of the outstanding artists on the German scene in the sixties and seventies and a forerunner of the appropriationist attitudes of the late eighties. His most recent artistic output has managed to keep the performance movement of the seventies up to date by inserting it into the social and political reality of the nineties.

The first stage of Feldmann’s professional activity was 1968 to 1980. During that period he produced a varied but coherent body of work, which includes an extensive series of small format booklets with apparently trivial images reproduced in black and white, letters, posters, postcards, coloured pages from newspapers, toys found and repainted, and plaster reproductions of classic sculptures painted in bright colours. Usually the images and objects come in series, unsigned, and are sold at very reasonable prices. In that way Feldmann produces a work based on the concept of plagiarism, on Barthes’ myth of the death of the author, the creative effect of the copy and the appropriation of the images and objects he draws from his own everyday life. Reproducing images and things that in turn have been reproduced ad infinitum (peace doves and romantic, sentimental swans, semi-naked girls, drivers dressed in leather, football players, scraps of clothing, etc.), Feldmann empties them of their representational character and inserts them at another level of reproduction, without representation or content, which carries an implicit criticism of the world of art and culture. That critical attitude is what decided him, in 1980, to quit the art circuit and open a shop selling souvenirs, curios, second-hand objects and antiquities in Düsseldorf. It was not until ten years later that he rejoined the world of art and returned to his usual vocabulary which questions the iniquity of mass-produced images, cultural values and feelings in general.

The Fundació Antoni Tàpies presented an exhibition which, though not a retrospective, spanned all Hans-Peter Feldmann’s critical work from 1972 to the present. Mostly designed by the artist himself, the exhibition included the books of images and other fundamental publications in his artistic output, together with painted plaster classical sculptures, offset black and white posters done in the seventies, offset colour posters done more recently, and a selection of the photographic series Time Series on which he has been working periodically since the seventies. The exhibition also contained objects pertaining to his facet as a collector of images, including postcards, photographs and toys.