January 2023–December 2024
Beni Muhl is a Visiting Scholar joining the Department of Art History for a two-year tenure starting in 2022. He earned a Master’s degree in Art History and German Studies from the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, and has a diverse academic background with an exchange at the Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne. Before his dissertation project at the University of Fribourg, he served as assistant to the curators Fanni Fetzer (Kunstmuseum Luzern) and Helen Little (Tate) for the exhibition “David Hockney. Moving Focus” (July–October 2022) at the Kunstmuseum Luzern. His extensive research laid the foundation for “The Lucerne Exhibition, 1935” (an exhibition remake including numerous celebrated avant-garde artists like Georges Braque, Alexander Calder, Pablo Picasso, and Sophie Taeuber Arp), which will be realized at Kunstmuseum Luzern in Summer 2025. He also acted as a Visual Arts and Literature Specialist at the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia.
Beni Muhl's doctoral thesis, for which he was awarded the Doc.CH grant by the Swiss National Science Foundation, delves into the work of the American Pop and Post-Pop artists Rosalyn Drexler and Kathe Burkhart. His research explores the artists’ models of subjectivity, arguing that in bourgeois society, selfhood is generally ambivalent and “impure,” containing contradictory, oppositional, or conflicting elements constituting a self. The countercultural critique of social conditions and aesthetic discourse thus rarely appears purely subversive and can collide with its aesthetic means. This becomes particularly evident in de-essentialization, deconstruction, or negation strategies applied by counter-cultural and anti-modernist movements where Drexler and Burkhart are located. His research raises significant questions about the function and effect of counter-cultural movements shaping postmodern subjectivity, how artists deal with their ambivalence, and at what point critique becomes a new mainstream.
During his two-year stay at the University of Pennsylvania, he will research Rosalyn Drexler’s archives at the Garth Greenan Gallery in New York and the Kathe Burkhart Papers at The Fales Library & Special Collections, New York University.
His research interests touch the fields of Pop Art & Post-Pop, Counter-culture, Subjectivity, Gender & Sexuality, American Post-War Art, History of Painting, Visual Culture, Art of the Avantgardes, Swiss Art.