Watch Bubbles
Curated by Chiara Bertola
Hans-Peter Feldmann (Düsseldorf, 1941) is an artist of international renown whose work revolves around the accumulation of images from anonymous sources or from photos he has taken himself. By illustrating the ubiquity of reproductions in the world around us, Feldman theorises the concept of the “missing original” in his work. In other words, it is the multiplicity of reproductions that gives the original its value, rather than the other way round.
A new generation of artists have rediscovered Hans-Peter Feldmann’s ability to reflect on the accumulation of images, bringing into question the mechanisms of the art market and the way value is attributed to a work. In 2010 he won the Hugo Boss Art Prize at the Guggenheim Museum and used the prize money to plaster the exhibition space of with a hundred thousand one-dollar bills.
For HangarBicocca, Feldman has gone back to one of his best-known and best-loved works, creating a new version of it. Shadow Play is a work at the crossroads between photography and cinema, environmental installation and theatre. It uses movement and light as a compositional element to give a poetic reflection on the countless ways in which images can be interpreted.