The Phenomenological Experience of Contemporary Painting in the Triangle of Artist, Artwork, and Viewer

Abstract

This article explores the triangular relationship between artist, artwork, and viewer through a phenomenological analysis of Barnett Newman’s Vir Heroicus Sublimis (1950-51), positioning the painting as a dynamic site of embodied, affective, and cognitive exchange. Drawing from contemporary aesthetics, visual semiotics, and reception theory, the study argues that meaning in abstract painting is not transmitted unilaterally from the artist but co-constructed in an experiential encounter mediated by the artwork. Newman’s formal strategies – monumental scale, chromatic saturation, and spatial segmentation through “zips” – are examined not merely as aesthetic choices but as deliberate mechanisms for activating perceptual and emotional immersion. The viewer is conceptualized as a co-creator whose embodied responses and interpretive acts contribute to the aesthetic event, transforming static visuality into a living, participatory field. The article engages interdisciplinary research, including neuroaesthetics and post-phenomenology, to illuminate how spatiality, cultural memory, and sensory modalities inform viewer reception. In doing so, it proposes a relational model of meaning-making that reframes abstract painting as a shared ontological space rather than an autonomous object. The analysis ultimately challenges modernist assumptions of artistic autonomy, offering instead a dynamic structure in which affect, presence, and interpretation unfold simultaneously. This model is especially relevant in post-digital contexts, where the relational fabric of art continues to evolve across physical and virtual environments.