Recently, abstraction has been theorized as the governing principle of our contemporary society. Accordingly, the abstracting effects of an advanced global capitalist society controlled by financial transactions, an everyday life shaped by dematerializing screen cultures, and maybe not least the growing expansions of artificial intelligence intervene into more and more realms of society and contribute to an abstracted and intangible perception of reality, which defines our state of being today. By contrast abstract paintings and sculptures, especially as gestural forms, are frequently interpreted as authentic, universal and subjective.

Some abstract paintings and sculptures made since the turn of the millennium, use digitally generated images in conjunction with imaginative abstractions to rematerialize art as a means to invoke sensation. While the object itself, often large in scale, insists on permanence and gestalt, artists also turn abstraction against its grain as they reject aspirations of the universal and spiritual. Through the use of digital tools, they employ dematerialized, fleeting images and reproduced feelings, which nevertheless reference a wide field of individual, social and political circumstances.

This paper will examine early forays into the digital such as Michel Majerus’ digital projections, that included his virtual archive of Abstract Expressionist brushstrokes by Willem de Kooning and others. It also explores the ways through which Albert Öhlen’s digital paintings navigate the tensions between virtual shapelessness and factual form. Both artists tested the ways through which these clashes of virtual and material, functional and autonomous, might generate new sensory experiences. Several decades later artists such as Jacqueline Humphries, Firelei Báez, Aria Dean and Julie Mehretu are more forthright: In different ways they use digital mechanisms
and reproduced images of violence to retrieve in their paintings and sculptures empathy, subjectivity and sensation.

A German art historian based in St. Louis, Dr. Sabine Eckmann’s research interests are focused on twentieth- and twenty-first-century art, with an emphasis on German and European art as well as art and politics, medium aesthetics, and critical theory. She has curated numerous award- winning projects, including Reality Bites: Making Avant-garde Art in Post-Wall Germany (2007), for which she received the Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation award for curatorial innovation. She co-edited and contributed to Art of Two Germanys / Cold War Cultures (2009) and its predecessor, Exiles and Emigrés (1997). In 2015 she co-edited New Objectivity: Modern German Art in the Weimar Republic, which won the College Art Association Alfred Barr Jr. Award and the Association of Art Museum Curators’ Award for excellence. Her most recent exhibitions are Ai Weiwei: Bare Life (2019) and Katharina Grosse: Studio Paintings (2022).

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 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.