The project explores new approaches to the history of modern art. Drawing on the paradigmatic importance of the textile in the development of modernism, a special focus will be placed on textiles and their relevance to societal challenges addressed in contemporary art (especially ecological and digital debates). According to T'ai Smith, the history of textile production provides us with a very vivid example of what Karl Marx called "formal subsumption," in which an earlier technique is taken up and channeled through the mode of operation of capitalism. For example, Sabeth Buchmann, Georg Vassold, and Smith have already analyzed the importance of textiles for the renewal of the field of art history, and Christine Checinska and Grant Watson have emphasized the ability of textiles to act as a catalyst for new ways of thinking in the arts. The project at the KHI, which takes a distinctly praxeological approach, incorporates the dimension of logistics and, above all, will show how textiles have both promoted and counteracted abstraction as a concept of modernity. Rosalind Krauss emphasized the paradigmatic importance of the grid for abstraction. In my habilitation project, which examines the work of the textile artist and graphic designer Lena Meyer-Bergner (1906-81), I elaborate on this important connection between weaving practice and the grid as a concept of modernity. The analysis of specific textile and other cultural practices as processual counter-practices to questionable paradigms promoted by modernity is central to my research at the KHI.