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DFG-Centre for Advanced Studies Imaginaria of Force

Photo: Creative Commons/YaYapas

Dr. Magdalena Grüner

 

Photo: Isabel James

Curriculum

Magdalena Grüner is a scholar of the entanglements of art and ocean science in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. She earned her PhD in art history from Universität Hamburg (Germany). She studied art history, philosophy, and design in Madrid, Vienna, and Hamburg. Her research has received generous support from the Gerda Henkel Foundation, the Princeton University Library, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), and the Getty Research Institute, where she was a predoctoral fellow in 2023/24 (Art and Technology). Before joining the DFG-Centre for Advanced Studies Imaginaria of Force as a junior fellow, she was a scholar in residence at the German Museum of the Masterpieces of Science and Technology in Munich. She will join the USC Society of Fellows in the Humanities as a postdoctoral fellow in the academic year 2025/26.

In her current book project, tentatively titled Claiming Truth, Picturing Doubt: The Painted Epistemologies of the Bermuda Oceanographic Expeditions (1929-1940), Magdalena examines the visual objects and picturing practices of these expeditions, which gained prominence as the site of the first crewed deep-sea descents. The book brings together the fields of art history and the history of science through the methodological framework of critical ocean studies. This approach seeks to uncover the unruly and obscure aspects of past scientific activity, which in turn provide a rich source for rethinking present and future epistemologies through the ocean.

Publications (selection)

  • One Photograph: Claiming Truth, Picturing Doubt. Or: When Knowledge and Ignorance meet in an ‘Empty’ Picture, Photography and Culture (forthcoming).
  • Sie haben uns ein Denkmal gebaut (und jeder Vollidiot weiß, dass das die Liebe versaut.), with Nina Lucia Groß, in: Lerchenfeld #60, Feb. 2022, pp. 64–68.
  • Coded Gaze & Male Default. Feministische Perspektiven auf digitale Kunstgeschichte, with Nina Lucia Groß, in: Kritische Berichte, 4/2020, pp. 67–76.
  • The Pages of Day and Night. Von Saatgut-Tresoren und Herbarien in Pia Rönickes Arbeit, in: Ina Jessen, Isabella Augart (eds.): Metabolismen. Nahrungsmittel in der Kunst, Hamburg 2020, pp. 41–54.
  • „It seemed we were a kind of a show.“ Pierre Huyghes Zoo-Dramen, with Kathrin Rottman and Tim Jegodzinski, in: Tierstudien 09, 2016, pp. 147–157.

Research project: Reflective Matter: Metallic Paint and the Energetic Imagination in Hilma af Klint's Nature Studies (1919/1920)

This project examines the use of metallic paint in Hilma af Klint’s Nature Studies, a portfolio of forty-six drawings on paper. Produced in 1919 and 1920, the artist investigates different approaches to picturing plants by interlacing botanical illustrations and schematic diagrams. These works intriguingly incorporate metallic paint alongside watercolor and ink, adding meaningful dimensions to her approach to materiality and perception. By focusing on this underexplored aspect, the project aims to contribute to a broader understanding of metallic paint’s role in af Klint’s oeuvre and more broadly in modern art.

Central to the project is the concept of forces—both physical and metaphysical—that af Klint’s picturings and writings invoke. Her work abounds in pictorial and written articulations of force, exploring its inflections such as yearning, equilibrium, and perpetual flux. Metallic paint, with its shimmering surface and reflective qualities, participates in a dynamic interplay of light, energy, and materiality, opening pathways towards an epistemology that transcends the binaries of material and spiritual, body and mind, visible and invisible.