Art Metropole

17 Jun. 2006

Book launch for Hans-Peter Feldman's Birgit

Artist

Hans Peter Feldmann

Time

2 pm - 5 pm

Art Metropole is honoured to celebrate the release of Hans-Peter Feldmann’s most recent artists’ book Birgit, published on the occasion of his current exhibition at the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver, from June 9 – August 20, 2006. The artist will be present at the reception to take place Saturday June 17, from 2 to 5 PM. Art Metropole is located at 788 King Street West.

The artist Hans-Peter Feldmann is a major figure in the conceptual art movement and a pre-eminent practitioner in the artist book and multiple formats. Feldmann’s approach to art-making is one of collecting, ordering and re-presenting. Culling imagery from the swollen vernacular of amateur snapshots, print photographic reproductions, toys and trivial works of art, Feldmann reproduces and recontextualizes our reading of them in books, postcards, posters or multiples. These gestures create inventories documenting the ephemeral aspects and unattended moments that in the end make up our everyday existence.

He began working in 1968, producing the first of the small handmade books that would become a signature part of his work. These modest books, simply entitled Bilde (Picture) or Bilder (Pictures), would include one or more reproductions from a certain type – knees of women, shoes, chairs, film stars, etc. – their subjects isolated in their ubiquity and presented without captions. Feldmann recognizes the problematic nature of pictures and art in a culture inundated by images. His specialty has been to heighten an appreciation of these images, to bring some order of understanding to them by removing them from the ordinary, day-to-day context in which they are first experienced.

With Birgit, Feldmann traces the everyday activity of applying make-up in a sequence of 72 photographs of a friend. We see every detail in its banal realization, from blending the powder to blotting the lips; Feldmann lets us be a part of it. Each successive image compels further a tender and unassuming curiosity, and Birgit‘s ordinary activity becomes at once peculiar and profound. Accompanying this bookwork is an insert with essay by Roy Arden, curator of Feldmann’s exhibition at the Contemporary Art Gallery. In correspondence to Roy Arden, Feldmann remarks about this work, “…of course you can see how she gets prettier with each picture”.

Birgit by Hans-Peter Feldmann – $30.00 – Vancouver: Contemporary Art Gallery, 2006
80 pp + insert, 73 ill., 17 cm x 24 cm, soft cover – Insert includes essay by Roy Arden
$30.00

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans-Peter_Feldmann

Images

1: Hans-Peter talks with Art Metropole's Tonik.
2: Hans-Peter talks with Roger Bywater, as Robert Fones speaks with Uschi.
3: Benny, Kate, Rita & Kim.
4: Anitra flips through some Hans-Peter Feldman books.
5: Uschi, Hans-Peter's wife, speaks with Art Metropole's Fern Bayer.
6: Ann Dean cuddles Kian, Art Metropole's newest intern.

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