ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Cognitive Science
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1609994
This article is part of the Research TopicBeauty and the Mind: Cognitive Science of the SublimeView all 4 articles
The aesthetic experience of the sublime for a group of Highly Sensitive Persons: Maselli's figurative style versus Rothko's abstract expressionism
Provisionally accepted
- University of Navarra, Pamplona, Spain
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
Contemporary art museums have become important learning environments to promote visitor aesthetic education. Each piece of art constantly sends different messages to the viewer and creates a person-art connection that can provide significant experiences. These connections can be established in the contemplation of the sublime. In order to understand how these connections occur, researchers present a study about the relationship between aesthetic experience and the sublime that can happen through the contemplation of contemporary art, both figurative and abstract. Specifically, this aesthetic experience with the sublime has been studied in a group of highly sensitive individuals. The abstract work of Mark Rothko's masterpiece "Untitled" (1969) and the figurative work of Fernando Maselli "Artificial Infinite" (2014) have been utilized. The study includes an instrument for the evaluation of the "aesthetic experience of the Sublime," in which four dimensions-perception, emotion, cognition, and spiritual-are considered. This instrument has been applied to a group of highly sensitive people. Based on mixed quantitative and qualitative data analysis, results show that these individuals can experience contemporary art painting intensely by perceiving changes in its sensitive features while vanishing self-references of time and space.
Keywords: Sublime, contemporary art, contemplation, aesthetic experience, Emotions, Highly sensitive person
Received: 11 Apr 2025; Accepted: 27 Aug 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Echarri, Miguéliz, Verea and Barrio. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Fernando Echarri, University of Navarra, Pamplona, Spain
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.