PhD in Fine Arts

Malerei im erweiterten Handlungsgefüge im Rekurs auf Barnett Newman und Hélio Oiticica

OPEN ACCESS

The topic and the methodology of this thesis have been developed from my artistic practice. The works of Barnett Newman and Hélio Oiticica are examples to examine painterly processes and intervention strategies that increasingly dynamize the relationship between pictorial space and real space in 20th century art. I evaluate this investigation against the background of my own artistic process. A cursory preliminary remark sets a historical framework that encompasses the art context of European post-war modernism and takes up various artistic and theoretical approaches to the question of how the difference between pictorial and real space has been negotiated in Western European and American art since the 1950s. These include the rhetoric of nothingness and the imagery of emptiness, the treatment of the so-called white cube as an exhibition space, as well as the concept of the ubiquitous using the example of Yves Klein's work. The main part of the PhD thesis is devoted to a detailed investigation of fundamental questions of topicality in the works of Hélio Oiticica and Barnett Newman and, on the basis of descriptions of my own works, explains the specific perspective of painting in the expanded structure of action, which I apply to the evaluation of Oiticica's and Newman's positions. Finally, I discuss the conception of an intervention that took place as part of the disputation at the Bauhaus University Weimar.