Art Metropole sales catalogues

Art Metropole sales catalogues with covers designs by Jenny Holzer, Lawrence Weiner, Daniel Buren, Robert Fones, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Lise Melhorn-Boe and David Shrigley. 

Dave Dyment & Roula Partheniou | 1 Pound

Dave Dyment & Roula Partheniou

1 Pound


Sackville, Canada: Self-published, 2025

[24] pp., 14 x 19 x 4 cm., boxed loose leaves

Edition of five signed and numbered copies

"A pound of strawberries equally divisible by twenty-three was assembled and photographed, then UV printed on card-stock the same weight as each strawberry.”

In other words, rather than purchase and photograph a pound of strawberries (like the Hans-Peter Feldmann work it references) we had to reverse engineer one. We bought several pounds from the farmer’s market, weighed each on a tiny scale and documented only the strawberries that weighed 0.7 ounces (see below). 

Each photograph of a 0.7 ounce strawberry is printed on a card that also weighs 0.7 ounces. So the collection (minus the box and title card) weighs precisely one pound. 

The photographs are printed as children’s flashcards, and the work is part of the exhibition A IS FOR APPLE, which takes the format of a classroom to explore pedagogy, pattern recognition, and pareidolia.

Originally we were collecting vintage children’s flashcards from charity shops, in the hopes of amassing an abstract pound of strawberries (below, bottom) but then it occurred to us that the printing process could reflect the conceptual conceit of the project. 




Housed in a handmade box, 1 Pound is available from MKG127, in Toronto. I think one or two copies remain. 

Forest for the Trees

The half-ass nature of posting recently is a result of Roula and I collaborating on an exhibition that opens this weekend at MKG127 in Toronto. 

Hans-Peter Feldmann looms large over the show. There is a deliberate re-make of one of his works, a completely inadvertent remake of another, and three works involving found photography.  The exhibition also includes three books, though two of them are represented as videos.

The found photography of the third video, though, owes more to a Meg Cranston work that I once exhibited when I worked at Mercer Union. She presented vernacular photography as a slide show, with bean bag chairs. The hundred or so dog portraits projected in the darkened space were not taken by her, or by a professional photographer, but by staff at a local shelter with neither the time, nor the training or equipment to perfect their pictures. 

But they did have the knowledge that a particular type of photograph helped the dog’s chances of being adopted. Pictures of dogs in cages didn’t go over well. Growling or looking angry, obviously was to be avoided. Or mangey. Give the dog a toy to play with and he’s more likely to become someone’s pet, they learned. Place her in front of a tree or some flowers and the dog’s chances increase, also. 

So the show became a loving testament to amateur photography, with serious life or death consequences. The photographs were only a month old - as I callously told the Globe and Mail at the time - but many of the dogs pictured were probably already dead. 

Our video features five hundred or so online images collected since 2012, accompanied by a 3000 word text about pareidolia. 

It’s life and death only in historical, evolutionary terms. As Carl Sagan explained “Those infants who a million years ago were unable to recognize a face smiled back less, were less likely to win the hearts of their parents, and less likely to prosper.”

The video is called Forest For the Trees and is the third of the three USB sticks pictured above. The exhibition is title A IS FOR APPLE, and runs from September 13th to October 11th. For more information, visit the MKG127 website, here. 

Hans-Peter Feldmann | Bilder / Pictures

Hans-Peter Feldmann

Bilder / Pictures

München, Germany: Kunstraum München, 1975

344 pp., 15 x 21 cm., softcover

Edition of 500

Hans-Peter Feldmann studied painting at the University of Arts and Industrial Design in Linz, Austria, but 

abandoned the medium and gravitated towards artists’ books, following the realization that photographs were “entirely sufficient” to convey his ideas. From the age of five he had kept scrapbooks of carefully cut out images from books and magazines, and this act of accumulating, cataloguing and arranging became central to his practice. He was a photographer best known for found photographs, and didn’t begin working with his own photographs until he was in his fifties. 

Between 1968 and 1971 he produced about thirty little handmade booklets, all titled Bild or Bilder (Picture or Pictures). These typically focused on a single subject, ranging from women’s knees to airplanes off in the distance, from a hotel maid making a bed to images of ships and chairs. In 1972 he was invited to exhibit these bookworks at Documenta 5 in Kassel.

This 1975 volume collects all of these Bilder booklets, plus two postcard series. The book features an introduction by Hermann Kern, and a text by Josef Kirschbichler. 

A reissue followed, over a quarter century later, in 2002, which has itself become scarce and costly. 

“[Bilder] constitutes one of the most important bodies of artist’s bookworks in the twentieth century, along with those of [Ed] Ruscha and [Christian] Boltanski. The key lies in the books’ deadpan nature. Next to Feldmann, Ruscha is a galloping expressionst. Of all collections in this vein – and it is a popular genre of artists’ books – Feldmann’s are the most deadpan, the least expressive.”

Extra

The periodical that Sol LeWitt called "The only magazine not about art but as art" was not the first, and certainly not the only serial artists' publication, but produced five striking issues in a just over a year, fifty years ago. 

Edited by Walter Lippert, the magazine focused on more conceptual practices, EXTRA featured writings and artworks by artists from around the world. 

Hans Haacke wrote about the censorship of his Manet-PROJECT '74 (as he did in Avalanche Magazine that same year). The work was rejected by the museum just prior the opening and in response Daniel Buren pasted copies of Haacke’s panels onto his own black-and-white wallpaper to circumvent the museum’s attempt at censorship (the museum's response was to remove Buren’s wallpaper, also).

Buren contributed two pages of vertical stripes printed on vellum to EXTRA. Sol LeWitt provided Drawings, Duane Michals contributed Portrait of Andy Warhol and Hanne Darboven provided Manuscript for a Film. 

Other contributors included Art & Language, Terry Atkinson, Robert Barry, Lynda Benglis, Antonio Dias, Ralph Gibson, Joseph Kosuth, Roman Opalka, Giuseppe Penone, Anna & Patrick Poirier, Bernar Venet and Gilberto Zorio. 

The fourth and penultimate issue (from April 1975) was devoted to works by David Askevold, produced from 1968 to 1974. 

Hans-Peter Feldmann was a victim of censorship, not by the magazine but by their printer: 

"We are so late as our printer refused to print this issue because of Hans-Peter Feldmann's contribution. You can't believe it's possible? It is!" 

EXTRA was reportedly produced in an edition of 500 copies each. In 2016, a complete set sold at auction for $594 US, just below the low estimate of between six and nine hundred dollars. 

Hans-Peter Feldmann | Wackelbild 'Abschied' (Swinging picture, Good Bye)

 

Hans-Peter Feldmann 

Wackelbild 'Abschied' (Swinging picture, Good Bye)

Dusseldorf, Germany: Feldmann Verlag Shop

21 x 10,6 x 5,5 cm. 

Edition size unknown

Waving goodbye. 

Hans-Peter Feldmann | Untitled (Bottle Openers)

Hans-Peter Feldmann

Untitled 

Shark Editions/303 Gallery, New York City, 1992

15.2 x 3.8 cm. (each)

Edition size unknown

Published by John Goodwin's Shark Editions of Gallery 303, this scarce work features three silver-plated bottle openers, mounted inside a felt-lined box.

Hans-Peter Feldmann, RIP

Hans-Peter Feldmann died on May 30th, according to a shared announcement from his eight galleries—303 Gallery, Martine Aboucaya, Mehdi Chouakri Berlin, Konrad Fischer Galerie, Simon Lee Gallery, Galerie Francesca Pia, Projecte SD, and Barbara Wien:

“His unique personality and his artistic understanding of the world we are living in will stay alive in the art he has left behind,” the galleries wrote in their statement. “Our hearts and thoughts are with his beloved wife Uschi, with whom he shared art and life for many years.”

He was 82 years old.