Schwab Transit (Genda 5, Genda 8, Die große Pause), 2024

With this work, Eva Schwab the Union area Transit (Genda 5, Genda 8, Die große Pause) transforms into a place of memory, movement, and transformation. Miraculous motifs unfold on widely visible flags, oscillating between personal history and collective memory. Like the pages of a visual diary, they tell of origin, change, and the search for identity—themes that run through Schwab’s entire work. The artist, born in Frankfurt am Main and closely connected to Hanau through her family, also references her family’s history with this work. Her grandfather founded the shipping company Schwab in Hanau during the post-war period, which, along with Otto, Neckermann, and Quelle, was one of the key players in the young West German consumer society. What was once considered a symbol of economic progress—the catalogue that brought the world into the living rooms—becomes Eva Schwab the starting point for an artistic reflection on memory, transformation, and cultural heritage.

For over two decades, Schwab has been working on an extensive pictorial family album that grew out of biographical beginnings and increasingly transformed into a universal system of references, reflections, and self-inquiries. Her „memory research,“ as she calls it, takes her from private photographs through historical and mythological motifs to historical and pop-cultural overlays. Complex fabrications emerge, in which female figures, alter egos, art quotes, and archetypal scenes overlap and coalesce into disturbing scenes.

In the series Transit these picturesque reflections are brought to the public – literally. The motifs Genda 5, Genda 8 and Die große Pause flutter in the wind as flags, thereby escaping the calm and uniformity of the classic tableau painting. The movement of the fabrics refers to the fleeting and unimaginable nature of memory, while the luminous color surfaces and figurative allusions open up an emotional, almost physical resonance space. The title Transit refers to transitions between generations, genders, times and identities. Schwab is interested in the „imprints“ that remain when the original experiences have long faded away. These imprints appear here as picturesque condensations that are at the same time both memory markers and new creations. That Schwab releases the pictorial motifs into the open air as flags is more than a formal decision: The flag, a symbol of belonging, nation, identity or protest, becomes in her work the bearer of the personal and thus the counterpoint to collective appropriation. The waving images refer to movement rather than possession, openness rather than imposition, memory rather than monument.

Mit Transit (Genda 5, Genda 8, Die große Pause) creates Eva Schwab a poetic and at the same time politically readable gesture. Her flags are signs of an ongoing search for the self, for connections across time and space, for a language for what remains when origin, history, and identity change.