Hans-Peter Feldmann

Hans-Peter Feldmann is an aggregator, using his impulse toward encyclopedic display to generate photographs, installations, sculptures, paintings, and a wide assortment of artists’ books. Some of his earliest works explored seriality by making unsigned, undated, unlimited editions of his works. Feldmann sustained this interest in counteracting commodification by working with found images and everyday ephemera, from images of lips and strawberries to the content of handbags he bought. To further resist commodification he regularly leaves both works and exhibitions untitled, acknowledging the value of the work should be what the audience absorbs from it. He went so far as to use his $100,000 reward from winning the Hugo Boss Prize in 2010 for an installation of $1 bills, covering entire walls in dense rows, pinned to the gallery walls of the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Feldmann directs attention to the alchemy of art—even a medium like money, grounded in value, is at the mercy of the audience’s interpretation of his abstract, immersive experience.

Feldmann has exhibited at a number of institutions including Guggenheim Museum, New York, Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland, Art Metropole, Toronto, Hirschhorn Museum, Washington, D.C., Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Illinois, National Centre for Contemporary Art, Moscow, International Center for Photography, New York, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland, among many others. He was also featured in the Sao Paulo Biennial in 2012, Gwangju Biennial in 2010, and the Venice Biennale in 2009 and 2003. The artist won the Hugo Boss Prize in 2010.