I am a freelance art historian and researcher with a strong interest in interdisciplinary issues. How can art be connected to its environment and time? How can theoretical lenses such as sociology, psychoanalysis, biosemiotics, technology, and perception of nature be used to pry meaning out of art?

A common thread in my work has been art's relationship to evolution in the broadest sense, from cultural to biological, to cosmic evolution. In my habilitation thesis, Landscape as World Picture (2005, English edition 2009), I demonstrated a developmental pattern in the history of landscape representation, from Paleolithic cave paintings to post-medieval times. Roughly speaking, landscapes gain depth as self-awareness sharpens. A remaining mystery, however, has been the art of our own time, the era after 1900, where the landscape and the naturalistic pictorial space are being disrupted. For the last few decades, I have worked with the idea that avant-garde art is characterized by a posthuman paradigm, where culture cannot be kept at a distance from nature, but is intertwined with it.

In my lectures I offer selected framing of this field of interest and related topics. I also offer peer reviews and editorial assignments.