Art Reviews

Hans-Peter Feldmann

East Gallery NUA

10/07/17

Hans-Peter Feldmann (b.1941) is a German artist especially well known for that archival impulse that we all have and show through collecting – from postcards or seashells to more specific objects that we consider to be one of a kind. Yet while collecting can be so much about desire, uniqueness, and knowledge, Feldmann’s accumulation of images is about something else. He is an artist whose art emerges from repetition, lack of authorship, and apparent randomness. He seems to mock singularity and the art world itself, overabundance and our consumerist society, aesthetics and popular culture – a mockery that he carries out through seemingly cheap and simple works that you have two more weeks to see in an even more humble exhibition than his practice. It’s called Art Exhibition and will be on until the 22nd of July at the East Gallery.

Unlike the common museum and gallery experience, in Art Exhibition you won’t see anything new but a bunch of photographs of strawberries, an assemblage of a certain kind of seascape paintings you have probably seen before a million times, the well-known Michelangelo’s David, or even a framed one dollar bill – because Feldmann’s artistic practice doesn’t aim to create anything new. He approaches originality in a different way, not trying to produce never-seen-before material but arranging already-existing images in new ways through which to reformulate new ideas.

However, rather than offering his propositions to the public directly and through single objects, Feldmann seems to enjoy displaying arrays and working with average, not specific ideas that actually raise more questions than they answer. What does a single photograph of a strawberry mean to you, and how does that change if it belongs to a group of other photographs just like it? And again with a seascape oil painting you considered to be unique? With these two works, Feldmann appears to attack individuality and the way we praise and judge images. He alludes to that subjective criteria we use to give more or less importance to certain images and compare representations such as a found picture of a strawberry and a depiction of a rough sea, both here shown as untitled mass-produced objects.

Although these are just a few of the multiple matters Feldmann’s Art Exhibition could make you think about, it doesn’t present itself as a complex show, and even less as a reflective one. The gallery is simple, ordinary, and so seems to be the little art that is inside. If Feldmann called it Art Exhibition is because he wants you to expect “art” on display, and tries to fulfill that expectation by presenting to you the one and only David that, even though is made of plaster, doesn’t it remind you to Michelangelo’s glorified sculpture anyway?

Mockery seems to be the key point of this exhibition, which although maybe too short of content, it does introduce you well to the practice of this tease artist and gets forever stuck in your mind as a reminder of how in the art world of today “everything goes”.

This exhibition is at NUA's East Gallery until 22nd July.