Ocula Report Havana Biennial 2019: Constructing the Possible 17 Apr 2019 : Federica Bueti for Ocula I first visited Havana in November 2016, a few days after Fidel Castro died, and just under a year before Hurricane Irma hit Cuba in September 2017. Since then, much has changed, including the hand-painted signs that punctuate the journey from the airport to the city centre, which today do not celebrate the revolution so much as the 'Unidad y...
Ocula Conversation Andrew Stahl and Guo Xiaohui The exhibition Beyond Boundaries at Somerset House in London (12 March–2 April 2019) marked the historic contributions of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing (CAFA) and the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London, on the occasion of their 100th and 150th anniversaries, respectively. Spread across several rooms of Somerset House's...
Ocula Report The National 2019: New Australian Art 13 Apr 2019 : Elyse Goldfinch for Ocula The National 2019: New Australian Art features work by 70 contemporary Australia-based artists split across three venues: the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW), Carriageworks, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA) (29 March–21 July 2019), as curated by Isobel Parker Philip, curator of photographs at AGNSW; Daniel Mudie Cunningham,...
Hans-Peter Feldmann (b. 1941, Düsseldorf, Germany) would not describe himself as an artist. He is a compulsive collector and appropriator of found images and everyday ephemera. His works have an aesthetic and conceptual simplicity. An interest in the formal language of typology is played out in pictorial assemblages of the overlooked and mundane; strawberries, shoes, seated women in paintings, lips, romantic seascapes, kitsch floral photography. His witty play with traditional aesthetics sees collections of classical paintings of nudes and portraits daubed with black crosses, red noses and cross-eyes.
Feldmann intentionally bypasses the rules of the art market and high culture by making unsigned, undated works and limitless editions. Similarly, his artworks and exhibitions remain untitled, thereby allowing the works to speak for themselves. In doing so he resists commodification and commercialisation – making his work purely about the value of the art itself. He is of the democratic belief that art cannot be owned and that it is purely the viewer’s personal experience of the work that engenders its worth.
Related Press Questionnaire: Candida Höfer Frieze : 17 January 2017 What images keep you company in the space where you work?Susanne Bürner: Tree Still (Sage), Tree Still (Coriander) and Tree Still (Chives) (all 2000). What was the first piece of art that really mattered to you?It was a work by Man Ray that I saw in an exhibition a very, very long time ago: The Lovers (1936).If you could live with only one...
Related Press Hans-Peter Feldmann on the link between contemporary photography and classicist painting British Journal of Photography : 7 November 2016 A new exhibition of work by German photographic artist Hans-Peter Feldmann is about to go on show at Simon Lee Gallery, Hong Kong.Characterised by its engagement with art history and vernacular imagery, Feldmann’s conceptual work derives from found images and everyday ephemera.Feldmann’s oeuvre mixes photography with sculpture, installation and...
Related Press The art in this show followed me out of the museum, told me I was going to die Observer : 16 September 2016 At the Jewish Museum, Halloween lovers can trick-or-treat a month early.In Take Me (I’m Yours), which opened today, all of the works by a roster of 42 international artists can be taken away. Visitors can leave with a T-shirt designed by Rirkrit Tiravanija, a blue and red pin conceived by Alex Israel, a tissue from Haim Steinbach’s...
Related Press Prends-ça! A Paris exhibition invites visitors to take the artworks with them Hyperallergic : 20 October 2015 Take Me (I’m Yours) at the Monnaie de Paris revives and expands a 1995 exhibition curated by Christian Boltanski and Hans-Ulrich Obrist at London’s Serpentine Gallery, in which all the art is designed to be touched and taken away. Chiara Parisi, director of cultural programs at the French institution, joins the duo in curating the 2015...
