Hans-Peter Feldmann
Nefertiti, 2012
Artist
Hans-Peter Feldmann
Title
Nefertiti
Year of creation
2012
Technique and dimensions
plaster, painted
Year of acquisition
2013
In this work designed especially for the Nationalgalerie, the artist Hans-Peter Feldmann, who lives in Düsseldorf, shows his view of the impressive queen sculpture of Nefertiti.
On December 6, 1912, the bust of Queen Nefertiti was found in the ruins of the ancient Egyptian city of Akhet-Aton, now Tell el-Amarna. 100 years later, the Egyptian Museum of the State Museums in Berlin took this date as an opportunity to dedicate an extensive special exhibition on the Museum Island not only to the famous bust, but to the entire Amarna era. Hans-Peter Feldmann, in turn, took the 100th anniversary of the discovery of Nefertiti as an opportunity to highlight the staging history of the bust from an archaeological find to a frequently marketed ideal of beauty, making it the highlight of Berlin's Museum Island in the New Museum, so current in Mies van der Rohes' temple of Art' at the Cultural Forum.
The artist, born in 1941, has been concerned with the effect of images and objects, the shifting of meanings and the overcoming of traditional artistic boundaries since the 1970s. His version of Nefertiti, created in 2012 and shown in the upper hall of the Neue Nationalgalerie, represents his own examination of the 'beautiful' (Nefertiti = the beautiful one has come). In shrill colors, Feldmann satirizes a range of topics: Supposedly blind to them the grace and fine design of the highly famous original, he mixes up aesthetic art concepts and questions, with a wink, what happens when what is not there is arbitrarily supplemented, what is old is updated and what is known is decontextualized.
In contrast to the original, Feldmann's 'improved' version of Nefertiti looks at the viewer with two eyes, while the content of today's everyday and party culture is projected onto the object through the addition of a beauty spot or bright make-up. With Nefertiti, the artist addresses both the interface between high and amateur art as well as the possibilities of the individual to participate in existing art and cultural history. Feldmann's joy in copying and unabashed appropriation comes to the fore, as does his search for general ideas of beauty and subjectivity.
The bust of Nefertiti is another work in Hans-Peter Feldmann's 'Antique Series'. In this series of works, the artist enters into a dialogue with the past by using found templates. In addition to Nefertiti, whose cast is based on a detailed scan of the original bust, this series also includes Michelangelo's David and the Venus de Milo.
