Eva Schwab | Biography

Photographs from her own family album and found ones form the base of Eva Schwab´s on-going quest for a sustainable visualization of collective memories – shaped as they are by identity, cultural imprint and environmental conditioning.
By scrutinizing the stereotypic scenes inherent to private photo albums, "after-images" are called up which the artist translates, extends and processes onto wax-saturated paper and canvas. The use of wax brings translucency into the paintings, and allows her to enter deeper layers. Such, the essence of the artist's "memory laboratory" is being distilled during the work process .
In her re-combined family album (Nachbilder, Volume 1+2), Schwab's "memory work" is merged into an universal family chronicle and raises questions about the quota of reality contained in memories in general and of photographs in particular.

 

Eva Schwab (* 1966 Frankfurt/M.) lives and works in Berlin. She studied painting with Prof. Markus Lüpertz at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. For more than ten years her major theme involves pictoral remembrance work.

Translation: Gabi Schaffner

 

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