Pair of shoes / Shoes with eggs

- Installation (Installation)

Hans-Peter Feldmann

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The types of objects Feldmann is interested in collecting into serial photographic grids or artist’s books are often also found in three dimensional installations. Verging on a form of fetichism, his shoe collections are a case in point and indeed, for some exhibitions, he even asked gallery employees for their shoes. Against authorship and the commodification of art, he never gives titles or dates to his works which have infinite edition possibilities. The mode of display is paired down to the simplest form of a plain square plinth that nevertheless conveys artistry. The presentation contributes to the re-orientation and re-contextualization of these assembled found objects taken from everyday life. This work, like hat with photo and teapot with shadow also in the collection, could be imagined as a form suggestive of portraiture. Secondary autobiographical components are sometimes included: a set of eight black-and-white photographs of shoes, Ursula + Hans-Peter, stands for the artist and his wife with whom he worked in a gift store when he left the art world in the 1980s. The positioning of this female pair of shoes is clearly deliberate and meaningful as is the literal and playful mimetic association of snakeskin and quail’s eggs patterning.

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Hans-Peter Feldmann creates intimate works that explore the link between art and entertainment. He does not date his projects, instead using the multiple as a snub to the art market and its suspicious sacralization. Rather than producing and inventing, he prefers to accumulate, recover, and collect. Feldmann assembles his findings, and collides them, letting the absurd and the poetic emerge. By giving images and objects back their strangeness, their tactile and emotional force, he expels the banal. His entire production questions the value of the artistic act. Through simple gestures and incongruous connections, Feldmann reminds us that art is an appropriation that populates our daily lives if we are willing to let it flourish.

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Colors:

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• shoe.n.01
• fetish.n.01
• authorship.n.02
• sacred.s.02
• collection.n.01
• dateless.s.03
• collecting and modes of display
• color photography
• conceptual art
• german
• photographer
• installation artist
• contemporary artist
• born 1941
• german contemporary artists