Leverhulme Early Career Fellow

Posted on 16 June 2020

We are delighted to announce that we will be joined next year by Dr Anna-Maria Kanta as a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow to work on her project "Communication Fever": West German Art during the Cold War.

Congratulations and welcome to the department Anna Maria!

Anna Maria received a BA in Law from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens in Greece (2008), before completing an MA in Contemporary Art Theory at Goldsmiths College (2011) and an MA in Museum Studies at the University of Athens (2012). After receiving her PhD in History of Art from UCL in 2019, she was a Juliane and Franz Roh Postdoctoral Fellow in Modern and Contemporary Art at the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in Munich.

“Communication Fever”: West German Art during the Cold War reexamines crucial transformations within the visual arts of the period through the lens of communication. The project makes the case that a focus on West Germany and its unique geopolitical position enables a diversified account of the ways in which communication was elevated during the Cold War to a politically charged trope, propelling and pulling artistic production in differing directions. Spanning from the early 1950s to the late 1980s, and embracing a heterogeneous breadth of artistic trends and practices – from Art Informel to post-conceptual art – it promises to reveal a shared cross-generational preoccupation with the communicative potentials and procedures of art and will offer new insight into the work of prominent and lesser-known West German artists, amongst them Karl Götz, the group SPUR, Gernot Bubenik, Bazon Brock, Marcel Odenbach and Anna Oppermann.