Columbia – Bettman Lecture Series: Frank Fehrenbach

Please join us for the third event in the 2016-2017 Bettman Lecture Series: “Materialities and Technologies,” hosted by the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University.

Frank Fehrenbach

(Hamburg University)

“Materiality, Factual and Actual. The Colors of Monochrome Sculpture”

Bettman Lecture Hall (Room 612), Schermerhorn Hall

The lecture is free and open to the public, and it will be followed by a reception in the Stronach Center on the 8th floor of Schermerhorn Hall.

“Materiality, Factual and Actual. The Colors of Monochrome Sculpture”

In my talk, I aim to reconsider the materials of sculpture as agents of latency. I will focus on the colors and “impurities” of early modern monochromatic stone and metal sculpture as a field of ambiguity, visual doubt, and instability. The actual colors of the monochrome provide the basis for the apparent “life” of matter. A convincing aesthetics of artistic materials would consequently need to depart from the immanent dynamism that enlivens these materials – by grasping materiality itself as a perceptual event.

Frank Fehrenbach is University Professor at Hamburg University where he leads the research group ‘Images of Nature’ within the Art History Seminar of Hamburg University. Professor Fehrenbach is currently working on the category of ‘liveliness’ in early modern art (1300-1800 ca.). In exploring such a category Professor Fehrenbach brings the arts into dialogue with physics, medicine, botany, and monetary economics. Professor Fehrenbach has been the recipient of several awards both in Europe and the United States, most recently the Humboldt Professorship of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (2013). Professor Fehrenbach has written on a variety of topics, including Leonardo da Vinci, medieval sculpture, baroque fountains, color in sculpture, neo-realist film, contemporary art, and lately the ‘liveliness’ of images.

Inaugurated in 2004, the Bettman Lectures are an annual program of lectures in art history sponsored by Columbia University’s Department of Art History and Archaeology. Endowed with a bequest from Linda Bettman, a former graduate student of the department, the lectures are named in her honor.

For more information, contact Emogene Cataldo and Alexander Ekserdjian.