The Kunstpalast Düsseldorf is currently showcasing the laconic images and obsessive collections of knick-knacks by Hans-Peter Feldmann, the conceptual artist who died in 2023. The retrospective exhibition, running until January 11, 2026, presents around 80 works spanning the entire breadth of Feldmann's oeuvre across ten rooms, from photography to graphic and sculptural works to his artistic collections.

Feldmann once recalled seeing his first nude at the Düsseldorf Kunstpalast in the old masters collection, which is why he had no objection when the institution approached him in 2021 to organize a retrospective. His only condition was that he didn't want to have any work involved in organizing it. This laconic attitude was typical of Feldmann, though his relationship with Düsseldorf was also ambivalent. He had wanted to study there, but his application to the art academy in the 1960s was rejected. Instead, he went to what was then the Municipal Art School in Linz, Upper Austria.

Even when he later moved back to the Rhineland, Feldmann maintained a self-chosen distance from the local art scene. Humor became his artistic instrument, functioning as a hybrid of conceptual depth and amusing slapstick. He remained skeptical of the art market, not without ironic references in his works to Düsseldorf's great artists like Joseph Beuys, Gerhard Richter, or the Bechers. This anti-establishment stance earned him recognition as 'the anti-artist.'

The exhibition begins with his first photographic works, including series of the dreary Oberkasseler Bridge in Düsseldorf and shots of a neighbor who ritually cleaned her windows in rhythmic patterns. A selection of his small picture booklets in various formats hangs from the ceiling in the exhibition. These booklets bundle his own photographs or flea market finds in gray cardboard covers, presented in a matter-of-fact manner. They appear as '5 Pictures' of unmade beds, '7 Pictures' of family photos, and '45 Pictures' of shoes. '1 Picture' is devoted to a dress. In 1974, a sartorial inventory grew to 70 pieces titled 'all the clothes of a woman.'

By 2001, Feldmann's collection of human portraits expanded to 101 photographs featuring people aged from a few months to 100 years old. Not all of these were his own photographs. The room is choreographed according to his specifications, including a lavishly colorful bouquet of flowers that is regularly renewed. Among those portrayed is Feldmann's six-year-old niece Julia, who became an artistic partner responsible for alienating color versions of copies of classical sculptures: the pop-art Nefertiti and the dark-skinned mini-David. But it was especially Feldmann's wife who became his primary collaborator.

Although the artist was represented at Documenta in 1972 and 1977, he felt denied the major breakthrough he deserved. He perceived it this way, at least, and withdrew with his wife for years into their store, which had opened in Düsseldorf's old town in 1975. The shop featured technical antiques, knick-knacks, cuckoo clocks, and mechanical tin toys. This store, which had to relocate several times, became an overflowing cabinet of curiosities filled with individual mythologies—following Harald Szeemann's concept introduced for Documenta 1972—and evolved into a total work of art.

In 2015, this extensive environment was transferred to Munich's Lenbachhaus as a major installation. In the Düsseldorf exhibition, a few display cases with curiosities provide a small insight into this artistically combinatorial collecting obsession. Feldmann returned to exhibiting in 1989 with an old presentation after Kasper König convinced him to participate. For König's sculpture projects in Münster in 2007, Feldmann took on the underground restroom facility at Cathedral Square, reactivating it with colorful tiles, floral images, and his typical bric-a-brac. Critics found this too shallow, dismissing it as merely nice design.

Feldmann deliberately avoided conventional painting and traditional art-making. For his '15 Seascapes,' he found paintings of the corresponding genre at flea markets and had his colleague Joseph Sappler, who called himself Feldmann's image editor, remove all the ships, leaving only the natural forces. The duo also placed red noses on classics of portrait art and gave them cross-eyed looks, creating humorous subversions of traditional masterpieces.

However, Feldmann was also capable of harder-hitting work. When Austria's first government involving the right-wing nationalist FPÖ was sworn in in February 2000, he deconstructed the Viennese political magazine Profil, presenting only images without text as a commentary on 'Europe's shame.' After 2001, he collected over 150 front pages about the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, exposing their stereotypical image politics. He questioned whether a complex global situation could be interpreted through a handful of identical horror photos.

Feldmann likely found the perfect photographic tableaux of technical buildings that made Bernd and Hilla Becher famous to be too simplistic. Instead, he turned to large-format photography to capture industrially produced bread slices, offering a mundane counter-narrative to the Bechers' systematic documentation. A print of this work now leans casually against the wall in the Kunstpalast, embodying Feldmann's characteristic blend of conceptual rigor and deliberate informality.

The exhibition, which will later travel to the Kunst Museum Winterthur, offers a comprehensive view of an artist who consistently challenged conventional notions of what art should be, transforming everyday objects and found materials into pointed commentary on contemporary culture and the art world itself.