Charlotte Matter (she/her) is Laurenz Assistant Professor of Contemporary Art at the University of Basel. She studied visual communication in Lucerne and Vienna, then art history and film studies in Zurich. In 2021, she received her doctorate in art history from the University of Zurich with a dissertation on plastics in art of the 1960s and 1970s from a feminist perspective. She is co-director of the research group “Rethinking Art History through Disability” and a founding member of CARAH – Collective for Anti-Racist Art History. Since 2023 she is also co-editor of Sculpture Journal at Liverpool University Press. Previously, she was a researcher and lecturer at the Institute of Art History at the University of Zurich, where she coordinated the master’s program “Art History in a Global Context” from 2015 to 2024. In 2019/2020, she was a member of the research initiative “Rome Contemporary” at the Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for Art History in Rome and a fellow at the Istituto Svizzero di Roma.
Talking Abstraction: The Colors of Bass
A Presentation by Charlotte MatterSunday, 30 November 2025, 4 PM
Auditorium
Charlotte Matter
Photo: Lukas Wassmann
The event ticket includes admission to the exhibition.
How does our understanding of abstraction and color change once its political charge becomes visible? Taking Steve McQueen’s Bass (2024) and its characteristic color cycle as a point of departure, Laurenz Assistant Professor of Contemporary Art Charlotte Matter turns her attention to the conditions under which we perceive, contextualize, and (politically) infuse colors with meaning. The lecture opens up a wide field of reflections that reframe the relationship between abstraction and political content: Can colors be understood as purely formal-aesthetic phenomena? And what happens when their cultural, historical, and colonial entanglements come to the surface?
Drawing on art-historical and theoretical perspectives, Matter examines how the meanings of color are continually reshaped—between aesthetic autonomy and political charge, between historical attributions and social projections. Central to this inquiry is the question of whether abstraction can ever truly detach itself from figuration and content. Historical reference points such as art emerging from the Civil Rights Movement, feminist artistic strategies of the twentieth century, and abstract expressionism during the Cold War serve as resonant frameworks through which Matter considers the perception and significance of Bass. From Steve McQueen’s work, the broader question emerges: What can the art-historical category of abstraction mean today?
The presentation is held in German.