Styles of Color and Modes of Art Centric Lighting: Lighting for Paintings between LED Lighting Technology and Perceptual Aesthetics

• Applicants: Professor Dr.-Ing. Tran Quoc Khanh; Professor Dr. Christoph Wagner
• Subject Area: Human Factors, Ergonomics, Human-Machine Systems ; Art History
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 544496372

Museums are cultural institutions in which exemplary objects of fine art (paintings, sculptures, etc.) are collected, researched and exhibited. These objects represent the human artistic imagination and are cultural documents of their time. The design of the museum and the room atmosphere play a central role in the presentation of these irreplaceable values, especially the specific design of the museum lighting, as it must combine aesthetic perception and object preservation. In an interdisciplinary interplay between lighting research and art history, this project aims to explore new possibilities for optimizing the lighting systems in museums in order to sustainably combine an ideal, painting-specific, differentiated perceptual-aesthetic presentation with the conservation conditions for preserving the substance of the art objects. The first objectives of the research project are to determine and classify the current perceptions and requirements of both museum visitors and museum staff by means of questionnaires and interviews. Building on this, experimental studies will be carried out on a series of original works of art on the innovative presentation of these works of art under specific lighting situations (lighting levels, interplay of spot lighting and ambient light, color temperature and color saturation) both in the laboratory and in real museum spaces. With the help of eye-tracking experiments, the quantitative and qualitative changes in eye movements in front of works of art as a function of different lighting conditions will be methodically examined and hypotheses for adaptive lighting of paintings from different art eras, color styles and color compositions will be developed from the results of these experiments. Finally, a link between the optimal lighting conditions and the specific coloristic disposition of the artwork as well as the original historical and spatial context will be derived.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants