Hans-Peter Feldmann
° 1941
Born in Düsseldorf (), lives in Düsseldorf ().
"I was asked by a young artist how I would define art. And I replied something like this: somewhere there is a large meadow, and that’s the world. A beautiful, colourful, green meadow. And there in the middle of it is a rectangular fence which cordons off a part of it. And the inside bit is art, and around it is the world. And when the fence falls down, art is the world, and the world is art. That’s the sentence about the fence." - Hans-Peter Feldmann
In 1968, Feldmann gave up painting, arguing that photographs were "fully sufficient" to convey the idea of his art, and he has ever since worked primarily with reproduced images found well outside any fine-arts context. He takes them from the mass media or finds them at the flea market--magazine clippings, family snapshots, pinups, photo albums, posters, placards, amateur photography. Feldmann's reservoir of images spans the wide world of kitsch: pictures of sunsets, cute puppies, and idyllic landscapes, which even in grainy reproductions still harbour the promise of "beauty"; a trove that reflects the allure of advertising and personal and collective longings, as well as the banality of the (petit bourgeois) every day.
