FELDMANN, HANS-PETER
Düsseldorf 1941 - 2023

Title: Untitled.
Date: 2001.
Technique: Suitcase, broom and broom handle, sawn into 4 pieces.
Measurement: Suitcase: 15 x 45 x 28cm, broom (in total):128 x 32 x 8,5cm.


The work is a wedding gift from Hans-Peter Feldmann to Barbara Weiss and Kasper König.

Provenance:
- Kasper König Collection, Berlin (directly from artist)

Exhibitions:
- Gallery Thomas Fischer, Berlin 2018

Every time I do something, then it's a kind of liberation. And of course, the reactions I get are a form of acknowledgement. Maybe public presentation is part of what makes the therapy effective.
-Hans-Peter Feldmann

Hans-Peter Feldmann has been collecting, archiving and arranging found everyday objects and photographs since the late 1960s, which he documented in his series "Bilderhefte" (1968-75). As a pioneer of Appropriation Art, he influenced the young generation of artists of the 1990s. By using and combining objects that he removed from their contexts, he declared "non-art to be art". Even if Feldmann never wants to be perceived as an artist, his artistic oeuvre is unassailable. His conceptual art is not intended to provoke, politicize or intellectualize, but rather to show us what we believe to be familiar in a new light.

I think there are universal aspects in [Feldmann's] ouvre that are rendered understandable by [his] very everyday use of media which for a long time were not associated with art. At the moment of course, this is being integrated or coopted. For a long time, it was only noticed by other artists or people with a deep interest.
-Kasper König

Hans-Peter Feldmann and Kasper König have been friends for many years, regularly participating in joint projects, publications and artist talks. After a break in 1980, when Feldmann put an end to his work, he devoted himself entirely to his Düsseldorf store and found his way back to art through König's encouragement. König visited him in his store to persuade him to take part in a Portikus exhibition. König's students would not have believed that Feldmann was an "old man". At Portikus in 1989, Feldmann amazed the public with the exhibition " Das Museum im Kopf (The Museum in the Head)", in which he tested the reproducibility of art.

Feldmann at the Museum Ludwig
At the Museum Ludwig, König dedicates an entire cabinet to Feldmann. A solo exhibition entitled " Kunstausstellung" (Art Exhibition) took place in 2003. Since then, the Museum Ludwig has owned the artist's most extensive collection. In 2006, Feldmann and König caused a sensation with the "David" statue based on Michelangelo's model, which was installed at Cologne Cathedral as part of the exhibition " Das Achte Feld". Due to its connection to the exhibition, which is dedicated to topics such as queerness and gender identity, the "David" is considered a symbol of the Pride movement.
By positioning it at the cathedral, however, the two do not intend to criticize the church and religion in relation to same-sex love in any way, but rather to interpret the sculpture as a sign of longing and homesickness. The statue's distant gaze is also an allusion to the Italian migrant workers who, as König explains, went to the main station after work to watch the trains back home. It took Kasper König four attempts to finally convince Feldmann to participate in "Skulptur Projekte Münster" in 2007. Feldmann's contribution was to adapt the public toilets on Cathedral Square to the standards of airports and hotels.

Suitcase, broom, broomstick
In the untitled work from 2001, Feldmann confronts the viewer with his pragmatic, direct approach. It is a new but sawn-up broom, the individual parts of which are neatly arranged and separated from each other in a suitcase. True to the motto: "What doesn't fit will be made to fit!", Feldmann manipulates the broom in order to adapt it to the dimensions of the suitcase. By dividing up the object and combining it with a suitcase in a seemingly arbitrary way, Feldmann not only succeeds in questioning the actual intention of the materials used, but also in redefining them. Bringing familiar material together in simple groupings and thus undermining the audience's expectations through minimal but effective intervention, testing it against socially established thought patterns and rigid definitions, is a recurring core subject of his oeuvre.