Hans-Peter Feldmann

The principle of the everyday and the demystification of the concept of art in the work of Hans-Peter Feldmann

The Rhineland-based conceptual artist Hans-Peter Feldmann (born on 17 January 1941 in Düsseldorf; who died in May 2023) is one of the leading figures in German and international conceptual art, the foundations of which he has played a decisive role in shaping since the late 1960s. His artistic practice is characterised by a consistent departure from the traditional ideals of the cult of genius, originality and the auratic individual work. Instead of academic, monumental creations, Feldmann draws on an encyclopaedic repertoire of found everyday objects, anonymous mass-produced photographs, postcards, toys and trivial consumer goods, which he collects, archives and transposes into new, ephemeral contexts. Using the stylistic devices of subtle humour, subversion, irony and a subtle everyday poetry, he deconstructs institutionalised ways of seeing and lays bare the mechanisms of the bourgeois world of art and commodities. His serial arrangements and ready-made-like constellations of objects reveal a profoundly democratic and personal perspective on the aesthetics of the banal, through which he radically questions the conventional understanding of art and its market value and advocates for the equal status of high and popular culture.

Capturing this elusive, process-oriented artistic stance—one strongly characterised by strategies of refusal—presented specific methodological challenges for the art-historical film documentary. In a large-scale, long-term project, Feldmann was continuously filmed over a period of five years by the filmmaker and photography curator Ralph Goertz, both in the intimacy of his Düsseldorf studio and whilst realising his exhibitions in Düsseldorf, Hamburg and Berlin.

The result is the film WITHOUT WORDS.

Prompted by Feldmann’s lifelong scepticism towards theoretical self-explanations, the documentary completely dispenses with the traditional elements of spoken interviews or the use of off-screen commentary. This deliberate formal restriction reflects the artist’s conceptual principle within the medium of film: the work and the act of creation speak for themselves. Through the simple observation of everyday gestures – the sorting, the precise placement of objects within the museum space, and the non-verbal interaction with his surroundings – the film paints an unbiased, deeply personal and psychological portrait of the Düsseldorf-based artist. This long-term documentary thus serves not only as a biographical record of its time, but also as a standalone phenomenological analysis that permanently preserves, for art-historical research, the inherent connection between Hans-Peter Feldmann’s lived world and the genesis of his work.

Watch the film on Vimeo!

Photos: Ralph Goertz © IKS-Medienarchiv