Stamps with paintings and passepartouts, 2016

Miami Beach 2016
Stamps with paintings and passepartouts

Mehdi Chouakri

Mixed Media
150 stamps, passepartouts, wooden strips, metal brackets, screws
170.0 x 450.0 （厘米）
66.9 x 177.2 （吋）
"I am not interested in the highpoints of life. Only five minutes of everyday are interesting, I want to show the rest, normal life." Hans-Peter Feldmann This assemblage of 150 stamps in passepartouts is emblematic of Feldmann’s visual approach. In this work the artist presents his amazing private collection of international postal stamps, mainly consisting of female nudes throughout art history, from Tintoretto to Rubens, Ingres, Delacroix, Renoir, Gaugin, Modigliani and Picasso – in fact a huge "museum en miniature", relating to the idea of the musée imaginaire. By presenting rather insignificant, ordinary things in such a particular way, normally reserved for works of art, Feldmann shifts those stamps into the sphere of art. Before the birth of the digital era, stamps were also synonymous to a more romantic notion of other cultures, exoticism and travels. In a way Feldmann here also plays with the ambiguity of the old-fashioned German expression "jemandem seine Briefmarkensammlung zeigen" ("showing somebody one's stamp collection") similar to the English pick-up line "would you like to come up and see my etchings?"