Hans-Peter Feldmann - Eine Stadt: Essen - 1977

VERY RARE, VERY EARLY, AND HIGHLY SOUGHT-AFTER PHOTO AND ARTIST BOOK from 1977 -
by Hans-Peter Feldmann (1941-2023).

“Eine Stadt: Essen” at the Museum Folkwang was the FIRST IMPORTANT INSTITUTIONAL EXHIBITION of Hans-Peter Feldmann. On this occasion, the artist’s book of the same name by the Düsseldorf-based conceptual artist was also published. His work is closely connected to photography.

Hans-Peter Feldmann was a German visual artist who's approach to art-making was one of collecting, ordering, and re-presenting. Creating carefully conceived installations from everyday images is what Hans-Peter Feldmann is best known for.

The excellent book focuses on an unspectacular, everyday view of the Ruhr-area city of Essen.

EXCELLENT, VERY FRESH, MUCH BETTER THAN USUAL CONDITION.

Here are the central characteristics and themes of the book:

The banality of everyday life:
Instead of landmarks (such as the Villa Hügel or the Zeche Zollverein), Feldmann presents casual scenes, streetscapes, backyards, and ordinary places.

Documentary photography:
The book contains over 300 black-and-white photographs taken during a six-week stay in the Ruhr region.

Democratization of art:
Feldmann pursued the idea of deriving art from the everyday and making it accessible to everyone.

Structure:
It is a typical “Bilderheft” (picture-book) work by Feldmann, in which the sequencing and cropping of the images create a distinctive, almost sober atmosphere of the city in the 1970s.

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Hans-Peter Feldmann spent a period of over six weeks in Essen and the surrounding Ruhr district, travelling by car and taking hundreds of black-and-white photographs. As usual Feldmann did not select any spectacular images for the 318 photographs used in the book. Instead, we are presented with blurred photographs, overcast images that reflect the artists reality: nondescript housing blocks, disjointed views of parked cars, empty fields, electricity pylons, randomly angled close-ups, and other general scenes of mundanity." (Hans Dickel, Künstlerbücher mit Photographie seit 1960, page 91; Werner Lippert, Feldmann: Das Museum im Kopf, page 100).

Hans-Peter Feldmann is famous for "Die Toten" (Martin Parr, The photobook, vol 2, page 157). "Bilder" ("Pictures") from 1971, "Der Überfall" (The Heist) from 1975 and many other artist books.

Museum Folkwang, Essen. 1977. First edtion, first printing.

Yellow wrappers with title printed in black on front cover and spine (as issued). 150 x 206 mm. 172 pages. Offset black-and-white reproductions of 318 photographs by Hans-Peter Feldmann. Einführung: Zdenek Feli. Text in German.

Condition:
Inside and outside very fresh with light trace of use only; no remarkable flaws or defects. No marks, no foxing. Overall very fine, much better and fresher condition than usual.

Fantastic, very rare photo and artist book by Hans-Peter Feldmann - in wonderful fresh condition.

"Hans-Peter Feldmann was born on 17 January 1941. In the 1960s, Feldmann studied painting at the University of Arts and Industrial Design Linz in Austria. 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. In 1979 Feldmann decided to pull out of the art world and just make books and pictures for himself. In 1989 the curator Kasper König persuaded Feldmann to exhibit in a gallery again.
Feldmann died on 24 May 2023, at the age of 82.
Feldmann was a figure in the conceptual art movement and practitioner in the artist book and multiple formats. Feldmann's approach to art-making was one of collecting, ordering, and re-presenting amateur snapshots, print photographic reproductions, toys, and trivial works of art. Feldmann reproduced and recontextualized our reading of them in books, postcards, posters or multiples.
Feldmann made his first series of books between 1968 and 1971. His works from the early 1970s include 70 snapshots depicting All the Clothes of a Woman and four Time Series projects including, for example, a row of 36 pictures of a ship moving along a river. Feldmann's series Photographs Taken From Hotel Room Windows While Traveling clusters 108 nondescript, unframed snapshots of buildings, streets, and parking lots (like other Feldmann projects, this calls to mind Ed Ruscha's photographic catalogs). 11 Left Shoes presents 11 shoes borrowed from "303 Gallery" employees, in a row on the floor. Que Sera has the words of the song of that title handwritten on the wall. Bed With Photograph simulates part of a hotel room with a slept-in bed, a side table, and a framed photograph of a woman in leopard-print pants.
Feldmann's photographic essays might have a more intimate singularity in book form. His book Secret Picturebook (1973) is a thick, densely printed, scholarly tome with little pictures of women's torsos in sexy underwear inserted at intervals. It most pointedly embodies the artist's mischievous relationship to high culture.
In 2004–2005 MoMA P.S. 1 showed “100 Years,” an exhibition of work by Feldmann composed of 101 photographic portraits of people ages 8 months to 100 years. And at the International Center of Photography in 2008 he filled a room with the framed front pages of 100 newspapers — from New York, Paris, Dubai, Sydney, Seoul and elsewhere — printed on 12 September 2001.
Feldmann was named winner of the eighth Biennal Hugo Boss Prize in 2010. This prize included an exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, in May 2011.
Feldmann's work features in prominent private and public collections, such as that of the Fotomuseum Winterthur and the MACBA in Barcelona. In 2012, the artist donated one of his key works, Die Toten (The Dead), to the Berlin State Museums in Berlin.
Feldmann was represented by Mehdi Chouakri Gallery in Berlin, Simon Lee Gallery in London, Galerie Francesca Pia in Zürich, Galerie Martine Aboucaya in Paris, and the 303 Gallery in New York. He did not limit the number of editions of his works, nor did he sign them."
(Wikipedia)