Hans-Peter Feldmann – Hugo Boss Price

Hans-Peter Feldmann was the winner of the eighth Biennal Hugo Boss Prize, an award by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation for significant achievement in contemporary art, with an attached honorarium of $100,000.

“I’m 70 years old, and I began making art in the ’50s. At that time there was no money in the art world. Money and art didn’t exist. So for me $100,000 is very special. It’s incredible really. And I would like to show the quantity of it.”

Hans-Peter Feldmann famously cashed his $100,000 check and pinned it in dollar bills to the museum’s walls, raising questions about the value of art. The installation, which uses money that has previously been in circulation, extends the artist’s lifelong obsession with collecting familiar material into simple groupings that reveal a nuanced play of similarity and difference. It took museum art handlers roughly 13 days to pin the out-of-circulation bills to the wall and to condense the surface area required by so much currency the dollars were slightly overlapped.

Bank notes, like artworks, are objects that have no inherent worth beyond what society agrees to invest them with, and in using them as his medium, Feldmanns primary interest in the serial display of currency lies less in its status as a symbol of capitalist excess than in its ubiquity as a mass-produced image and a material with which we come into contact every day.

Another well-known work, this time a single image, is “One dollar bill with a red nose” (2012) of a clown nose drawn on an American dollar bill. On the occasion of his exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery, Feldmann has presented an edition of hand-coloured banknotes. Feldmann has painted a red nose on each dollar bill, exemplifying the subversive humour that is evident in so much of his work.