210 × 268 mm
240 pp., black-and-white and color illustrations throughout
Hardback with tipped-in images on front and back cover
Facsimile of the artist’s original book
First edition
“80 per cent of artists are dealing with mother issues.” In this personal interview, the internationally acclaimed German artist Hans-Peter Feldmann reflects on the magnetic power of women and describes how he has used art as both escape and therapy.
“Make a job out of it and all is lost.” Feldmann does not consider being an artist to be his job, believing that doing so would diminish his enthusiasm. In his view, art has been discredited by the inflated prices reached at auction houses, where transactions occur between investors and collectors rather than artists. Art, he argues, should not be placed on a pedestal: “Art is an ordinary part of life like sports, food and sleep.”
Images of women are central to Feldmann’s work. He suggests that many artists are preoccupied with maternal figures: “It’s always about women, about mothers, images of women.” As an example, he compares public men’s toilets to ancient caves, filled with drawings of vulvas.
The repetitive act of collecting images serves a therapeutic function for Feldmann, making things clearer and more tangible. For many artists, art becomes a form of escape — “a flight to another world someone from the old world can’t access.” For Feldmann, who grew up during the war and post-war years and experienced his own maternal tensions, this was also true: “the images opened a world to me that was very, very lovely.”
Biography
Düsseldorf-based Hans-Peter Feldmann is a passionate collector of images and stories, an original thinker and one of the first conceptual artists. Since the 1960s, he has collected, produced and exhibited photographs, combining the humor of American conceptual artists such as John Baldessari and Richard Prince with the gravitas of German artists like Gerhard Richter.
His relationship with the art world has been unconventional. In 1980, he destroyed most of his work and entered early retirement, only to resume his practice a decade later, continuing from where he had left off.
Hans-Peter Feldmann was the recipient of the 2010 Hugo Boss Award, accompanied by an exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum, New York. His work has also been exhibited at Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis; MOCAD, Detroit; Serpentine Gallery, London; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. His work has been shown internationally for over 40 years. Feldmann lives and works in Düsseldorf.