Phenomenology of Space Between Bachelard and Heidegger with Regard to the Experience of Image

This thesis focuses on the materiality and bodily experience of the artwork and examines how matter, color, and form co-constitute the experience of the image. It draws inspiration from the perspectives of Gaston Bachelard and Martin Heidegger, both of whom argue that the experience of the image does not rest solely on symbolism or formal structure, but also on the direct impact of material on sensory and bodily perception. These approaches are developed both with regard to the poetic image as bodily and imaginatively experienced in real space, and to the space that is opened by painting. Bachelard's concept of material imagination emphasizes that the elementary substances - water, fire, air, and earth - are not merely objects of representation, but sources of concrete, bodily grounded experiences, which come to the fore especially in the poetic image. Heidegger complements this approach with an ontological understanding of the artwork as an event in which the world becomes present through the tension between its material and formal dimensions. Here, the image is not a mere representation, but a mode through which the world becomes experientially accessible and graspable in a different - usually overlooked - light. The thesis further compares these conceptions with modernist painting and shows that...