HANS PETER FELDMANN
ART EXHIBITION

The exhibition opening in the Deichtorhallen Hamburg on March 1, 2013 is dedicated to the major series, installations, sculptures and paintings of Hans-Peter Feldmann. Born in Düsseldorf in 1941, the artist shot to fame in the early 1970s with his encyclopedic photographic series, the material for which he found in the grand fund of everyday images. Feldmann bridges the ostensible divide between art and the everyday, and bathes things he finds in the banal world of the everyday, from amateur photos, toys and general bric-a-brac, in his own personal, poetic light. His works have been exhibited, in the Guggenheim in New York, at the Documenta and the Venice Biennale to name but a few venues. He has come to occupy the high echelons of the German art world, joining Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke as some of the country’s most famous artists, exerting a truly palpable influence on the subsequent generation of artists.

Even today, Feldmann’s creations have lost none of their seductive power, facility or subtle humor. In his works he touches upon childish, erotic yet nonetheless political cosmos, each an admixture of ready-made and artistic intervention. Examples range from the installation of a phantasmal shadow play, to the purses he bought from women on the street for EUR 500 a piece, whose contents he then exhibited in an art show; and from the artistic “Funkturm” installation, which was part of an exhibition on Deichtorplatz; to Michelangelo’s “David”, nine meters tall and painted in jarringly bright colors: The show presents everything that makes Feldmann’s work so special.

Hans-Peter Feldmann certainly has a few tricks up his sleeve for the exhibition in Hamburg. The visitors will be greeted by an upside-down car placed right at the center of the parking lot surrounded by a sea of parked cars, the right way up; the artist has also installed a painting station for children in the exhibition foyer.