Abstraction distinctly shaped European and American modernism in the twentieth century but also left its mark in Latin America, the Arab world, Asia, Africa, and Australia. Thus, its narrative as a purely western phenomenon requires a closer examination. The largely Eurocentric approach results in a distorted value system in which some works are more authentic than others. Such thinking, with respect to western primacy in artistic creation further enhances notions of primary vs. secondary, influencing vs. influenced, center-periphery and other “western vs. the
others” dichotomies in modernist and avant-garde art.

Artistic production in countries such as China and India, was largely untouched by the paradigms of first one- and then multi-point perspective and the illusion of three-dimensionality that arose in the Renaissance. Instead, an awareness of the formal and expressive possibilities of the media and techniques in use had been a commonplace understanding for Chinese ink painters and Indian miniature painters over many centuries. Thus, the radicalism of the European and American avant-garde was alien to artists in the East. In my lecture, I will discuss the work of nonwestern abstract painters who have developed their approaches in a dialogue between their own cultural traditions and their intensive studies of western art practices.

Isabel Wünsche is Professor of Art and Art History at Constructor University (previously International/Jacobs University Bremen) since 2001. She studied Art History, Classical and Christian Archaeology in Berlin, Moscow, Heidelberg, and Los Angeles and received her PhD from Heidelberg University. Her research interests are European modernism and its global dissemination, the avant-garde movements, abstract art, and émigré networks. Her most important publications include Biocentrism and Modernism (2011), Meanings of Abstract Art: Between Nature and Theory (2012), The Organic School of the Russian Avant-Garde: Nature’s Creative Principles (2015), Marianne Werefkin and the Women Artists in Her Circle (2016), Practices of Abstract Art: Between Anarchism and Appropriation (2016), The Routledge Companion to Expressionism in a Transnational Context (2018), Bauhaus Diaspora and Beyond: Transforming Education through Art, Design and Architecture (2019), 100 Years On: Revisiting the First Russian Art Exhibition of 1922 (2022), and “From Universal Visual World Language to Global Cross-cultural Dialogue,” in Representing and Understanding Abstraction Today and also in ARTFORUM online (2024).

Participation via Zoom link

Code: 366701

ID: 656 3202 5609

Part of the International Lecture Series 

Abstraction Today: The Real and the Imaginary

From automated navigation to weather forecasts, data visualizations, and painting, abstraction has an undeniable presence in the contemporary world. Yet, it not only represents but also creates worlds. It is an operative concept that likewise possesses an imaginary thrust for perceiving things otherwise. As such, abstraction comes in many different forms: It is an aesthetic, a technology, an epistemology, and a practice. Therefore, it is also a political attitude, a mode of description, a tool of complexity reduction, and an instruction for intervention. Depending on its context and use, it can take on radically different connotations, ranging from dehumanizing to appealing, from affirmative to critical, from incorporated to autonomous.

Taking its cue from the different meanings and applications of abstraction, the international lecture series “Abstraction Today: The Real and the Imaginary” is designed as an interdisciplinary endeavor with a focus on visual media and digital culture. Most digital technologies (like networks, computer simulation or artificial intelligence) and correlated practices are closely connected to different forms of abstraction on different levels. To do justice to the complexity of the phenomenon, the series brings together a group of international scholars, artists, and curators who speak on abstraction today as it unfolds in fields such as art, photography, film, design, image science, visual culture studies, philosophy, and more. Grounding the inquiries into the contemporary conditions of abstraction are contributions focusing on its historical lineage, most importantly its emergence within the discourse of modernism to be understood in its global and postcolonial plurality.

Further Program

December 2, 2025
Sabine Eckmann (Director and Chief Curator, Kemper Art Museum at Washington University in St. Louis): “Abstraction, Sensation and the Digital”

December 9, 2025
Sven Lütticken (Art History, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and Leiden University): “Lethal Abstraction and Alter-Abstractions”

December 16, 2025
Kim Albrecht (Information Design, Folkwang University Essen): “Data Visualization as Abstract Realism”

January 13, 2026
Birgit Schneider (Media Studies, University of Potsdam): “Making Climate Data Graspable through Visualization and Sonification in Art and Science”

January 20, 2026
Alberto Toscano (Sociology, Goldsmiths London): “A Practice of Abstraction: Race in the Field of Vision”

January 27, 2026:
Crystal Z. Campbell (Art, University of Buffalo): “Abstraction, Pareidolia, and the Underloved”

For any updates see https://www.medienwissenschaft.uni-bonn.de/lehrveranstaltungen/abstraction-today-1 

Organized by Svea Braeunert (Media Studies, University of Applied Sciences Potsdam & University of Bonn), Birgit Mersmann (Art History, University of Bonn), Jens Schröter (Media Studies, University of Bonn).

With the support of the Brandenburg Center for Media Studies (ZeM), the Gielen-Leyendecker-Foundation, and Studium Universale at University of Bonn.