Dr. Hana Gründler
Curriculum
Dr. Hana Gründler is Permanent Senior Research Scholar at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institute, where she leads the Research Group “Ethico-Aesthetics of the Visual”. She was Visiting Professor at the Institute of Philosophy at the Freie Universität Berlin, the Institute for the History of Art and Image (IKB) at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and the Institute of Art History at the University of Vienna. She is an image historian and philosopher working at the intersection of philosophy and art, with a critical focus on the ethical and political implications of works of art and the built environment. In her current book project she analyses first whether art and philosophy were perceived as subversive practices in the dissident underground scene of the ČSSR, and second inserts this narrative into a broader international context in order to rethink Europe in all its complexities. Among her most recent publications is the first German edition of and critical commentary on Leon Battista Alberti’s moral dialogue “Über die Seelenruhe” (Berlin 2022).
Publications (selection)
Monographs:
- Hana Gründler: Wittgenstein. Anders sehen. Die Familienähnlichkeit von Kunst, Ästhetik und Philosophie, Berlin 2008.
- Hana Gründler: Die Dunkelheit der Episteme. Zur Kunst des aufmerksamen Sehens, Berlin 2019.
Editions:
- Hana Gründler: Giorgio Vasari: Das Leben des Raffael, Berlin 2004, (3rd, extended and updated edition 2011) (= Edition Giorgio Vasari).
- Leon Battista Alberti: Über die Seelenruhe oder Vom Vermeiden des Leidens in Drei Büchern, ed. introduced and commented by Hana Gründler, together with Katharine Stahlbuhk and Giulia Baldelli, Berlin 2022.
Editorships:
- The Announcement. Annunciations and Beyond, ed. by Hana Gründler, Itay Sapir and Alessandro Nova, München 2020.
- Phenomenon 'Colour': Aesthetics – Epistemology – Politics, ed. by Hana Gründler, Franziska Lampe and Katharine Stahlbuhk, kritische berichte, 2022 (1).
Essay and reviews:
- Hana Gründler: „Orrore, terrore, timore. Vasari und das Erhabene”, in: Translations of the Sublime. The Early Modern Reception and Dissemination of Longinus' Peri Hupsous in Rhetoric, the Visual Arts, Architecture and the Theatre, ed. by Caroline van Eck, Stijn Bussels, Maarten Delbeke and Jürgen Pieters, Leiden 2012, pp. 83–112.
- Hana Gründler: „Borderline Experiences. Ethics, Art, and Alterity”, in: Log, 2017 (Spring, 40), pp. 43–65.
- Hana Gründler: „Schwarz ist nicht gleich Schwarz. Alain Badiou über die leuchtende Nichtfarbe“, in: Regards Croisés. Deutsch-französisches Journal zur Kunstgeschichte und Ästhetik, 2020, pp. 165–177.
- Hana Gründler: „Moral des Blicks oder Ethiken des Sehens?“, in: 21: Inquiries Into Art, History, and the Visual. Beiträge zur Kunstgeschichte und visuellen Kultur, 2022 (3, Nr. 2), pp. 311–341.
Research project: Politics of Imagination – Power of Solidarity. Unofficial Art and Philosophy in the ČSSR, 1948–1989
The leitmotif of my research project is the question of the extent to which art and philosophy were understood as resistant and transformative practices in the underground scene of the ČSSR that were able to break through consolidated everyday routines and thereby unmask the official, propagandistically determined conceptions of reality. Taking the works of 'non-conformist' artists and intellectuals such as Vladimír Boudník, Zorka Ságlová, Jan Vladislav and Jan Patočka as a starting point, I would like to examine the visual, literary, and philosophical strategies and ways of thinking and living that were developed and concretely tested in order to problematise the manifold degrees and limits of visibility and invisibility (in 'public' space) and to question supposedly fixed power relations. In doing so, I am interested not least in determining more precisely why imagination was celebrated by many unofficial artists as a disruptive faculty to which ethico-political potential was attributed. Or asked differently – and certainly with keeping in mind the present time: could there exist an indeterminate, ‘subterranean’ but nevertheless powerful force of art and thought that opens up horizons of participation and freedom and, speaking with Patočka, leads to a "solidarity of the shaken”?