9.8.25 – 30.11.25
Despite encountering life as individuals, we carry collective traces bound by the mortal threads of existence, family and history. Our personal stories are shaped by past, present, and future realities, all of which eventually become memories.
Sad Songs and Deep Family are two bodies of work by Dutch painter Daniela Schwabe (1984), presented together in this exhibition. Although created separately, the series stand poised on the threshold of merging, linked by their shared exploration of memory, time and transformation.
Sad Songs consists of hyperrealistic black-and-white oil paintings on 10×10 cm panels. These works meditate on the ways music and photography shape our recollections. Each image captures fleeting moments: snapshots that, over time, become the scaffolding of who we are.
For Deep Family, Schwabe turned to artificial intelligence, in collaboration with designer Casper Schipper. Thousands of photographs of Schwabe’s own family were fed into a neural
network, which responded by generating uncanny portraits of potential family members; awkwardly odd, strangely familiar. These
machine-created images were then transformed into oil paintings, bringing the human hand back into dialogue with the filtered, artificial process.
Across both series, Schwabe engages in a re-personification of digitized, media-processed memories. Her work demonstrates a cyclical process: organic, lived moments are transformed through technology and then re-rendered as paintings: objects that both preserve and reshape memory.
The resulting works mirror the metamorphosis of remembrance over time. They serve as tangible entities that hold onto the fragile, mutable nature of what we recall, while reminding us of the collective human experience that underlies individual memory.
Daniela Schwabe (1984) is a Dutch painter, living and working in Amsterdam. She obtained a cum laude Bachelor in Fine Arts at ArtEZ University of the Arts (NL) and pursued various artistic residencies in the Netherlands, Germany and the United States.
Schwabe’s practice explores the impact and interwovenness of history and remembrance on an individual and collective level. Working primarily in painting, she builds new structures to reflect on memory and the ways in which memories are conceived. Her work often takes shape in the form of iconographic-like paintings that weave together personal, historical and contemporary subjects.
Schwabe’s work is shown in diverse settings across Europe, from the historic Museum Villa Mondriaan in Winterswijk to the contemporary
spaces of Museum MORE in Gorssel and the experimental environment of Archiv Massiv in Leipzig. In each place, her practice has responded to its surroundings, allowing the work to enter into conversation with the people and contexts that shaped its presentation.
As a result of her achievements, Schwabe has been awarded the Rabobank award, a variety of grants and publications in outlets such as de Volkskrant, the NRC Handelsblad and Het Parool.
Her work is part of numerous collections, such as the DELA Art Collection, De Nederlandsche Bank Art Collection and the Rosewood Collection. Sad Songs & Deep Family at tender prospects is Schwabe’s first show in Portugal, presenting works that encourage
reflection on memory, identity, and the ties we share with others.
Daniela Schwabe – Kathy [2020]
Full show overview and pricelist to be requested via contact@tenderprospects.com.