About

1966 in Frankfurt am Main, studied Fine Arts at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and completed in 1996 as Masterstudent of Prof. Markus Lüpertz. In 1992, Schwab received the Arts Award of the Düsseldorfer Kunstverein and a residency at Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris. 1994 birth of daughter Marie, 1999 birth of son Emil. 2002, she taught as a visiting professor at the Royal Academy KABK Den Haag., NL. There followed work and residency Scholarships in New York, Vienna Jinan / China and numerous national and international exhibitions. Her work is represented in various private and public collections. Schwab is member of international graphzine artist collective Ruw!, of Female Painters Network Berlin/Leipzig, of Female Painter Network Frank* Frankfurt/Main and co-curator of HilbertRaum Artspace, Neukölln. Eva Schwab lives and works in Berlin.

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Collections

Olbricht Collection, Essen Metzler Collection, Frankfurt am Main Museum Voorlinden NL Collection, Wassenaar Armando Collection, Rotterdam Chabot Museum, Rotterdam Museum Montanelli, Prag Museum Musa, Wien Städtische Kunstsammlung, Frankfurt am Main Kerber Collection, Bielefeld Jean-Christoph Ammann, Frankfurt am Main Crespo Collection, Frankfurt am Main eva schwab #2 artzine


Bibliography



Statement

Seit mehr als zwei Dekaden arbeite ich an einem facetten- und umfangreichen malerischen Familienalbum, das sich im Zuge meiner Erinnerungsrecherche aus dem privaten Biografischen ins universelle Gesamte entwickelte.
Mein malerisches investigatives Interesse gilt jenen Nachbildern die auch noch dann empfunden, wenn die ursprünglichen Trigger-Momente abgeklungen sind.
Was mit kleinformatigen Aquarellen auf wachsdurchtränkterm dünnen Malgrund nach fotografischer Vorlage aus meinem privaten Archiv begann, entwickelte sich weiterführend in den neuen Werken großformatig über den Bildträger hinaus, als dünnhäutige Tücher, Keramiken und Rauminstallationen.

Es sind wahlverwandtschaftliche Beziehungen, Selbstähnlichkeiten, überwiegend weibliche Stellvertreter, kunsthistorische Zitate, mythologische und zeitgeschichtliche Elemente, Missverständnisse, Überschreibungen von Erinnertem, paradoxe Kommunikation, generationsübergreifendes emotionales Erbe sowie Phantombild-Phänomene , die in meiner angelegten malerischen Gesamt-Chronik Platz und Spiegelung finden.


For more than two decades, I have been working with the archive of the past and the possibility to create new combinations in the present.
By repainting the objective witnesses of what has been - in order to bring them in line with the reality of my evolving memory - I try to form associations between things that appear to be unconnected...
Photographs from my own family album, or those which could have fitted in my biography, are the source of my inquiry. This raises questions about the real content of memories in general and of photographs in particular.
In the attempt to understand the documents of the past I create “afterimages” by transferring them onto a wax-saturated canvas or paper. Using Hot Wax as a medium creates a parchment-like transparency in which injuries and vulnerability become visible. This use of encaustic allows me to overwrite, or to conserve the essence like perfumers, even to dissolve the template up to its ground form. Oil on wax grounded canvases ensures the essential translucency of different layers interfering to each other.


“As it is, when it was”, the title of one of my exhibitions, sums up, in the briefest possible way, the questions that preoccupied me and shaped my work for many years. What is the relationship between the present and autobiographical memory? To what extent are we able to detach our self-perception and our view of the world from the input of the past? And is this even pivotal to identity and self-presence, or is it rather the case that history and the present are woven together into a fabric that can be constantly augmented with new patterns- until it is handed out down to the next generation, who in turn will complete it? My paintings are the testimony of different generations and a very personal impetus morphs into a universal appeal. The familiar moves beyond the ethnic and political, becoming a historical whole - a historical body. The focus now is not only on what has been but on what lies ahead. To the world we know, I try to add a new or other world, one whose reality eludes photographic documentation. Now, old myths appear next to metaphors for abstract scientific concepts, mysterious forces and the euphoric belief in progress of a technologized civilization.

These apparitions are not set on stage in or defined by linear time but rather by their simultaneity, which resurfaces in each individual, i.e. collective consciousness, sediments of experience, transplanted experiences, projections, scars and ornamentation**.*****