Antonia Kölbl (she/her) studied art and visual history and American studies at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, and Concordia University in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal. As a student assistant, she worked for Prof. Dr. Kai Kappel (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) and Prof. Dr. Barbara Wittmann (Universität der Künste Berlin). After earning her bachelor’s degree in 2017, she completed a traineeship in the communications department of the Kulturstiftung der Länder in Berlin. She concluded her master’s studies in 2021 with a thesis on the reception of J. M. W. Turner in both German states, focusing on the first monographic exhibitions. From 2022 to 2025, she served on the editorial board of Texte zur Kunst, most recently as its head. Since 2026, she has been pursuing a PhD within the SNSF project “Modern Painting and the Lesbian Gaze: Queer Women Artists in Europe, 1900–1950” and is a member of eikones.

In the work of the Parisian painter Émilie Charmys (1878–1974) and in related archives, there are numerous traces of desires and encounters that resist description through normative conceptions of gender and sexuality. This dissertation develops an analytical framework to adequately discuss them by drawing on the methods of feminist and queer art history. The project focuses on three groups of works: nudes and portraits of women as well as still lifes. In order to explore the possibilities of painterly representations of gender performances and sexualities that were typologized as deviant by medical and psychological discourses beginning in the late 19th century, the study reconstructs the painter’s historical context. In addition to personal relationships and debates in art criticism, this includes in particular the at times overlapping fields of literature and sexology. Furthermore, the intersectional approach examines the ways in which class as a power structure shaped Charmy’s subject position and the status of her painting as a commodity. Against this backdrop, image analyses highlight the moments in which Charmy’s painting deviates from the historically situated “straight line” (Sara Ahmed) of heteronormative forms of expression.