Tanja Schaub's work begins in sensation rather than observation. Light on a surface, the weight of a shadow, a smell or sound that arrives before thought does. These are the primary materials, translated through paint, mark-making and intuitive process into atmosphere and form. The works are not images of the external world but records of how the world lands in the body.


Rather than depicting experience with precision, she distils its residue. Driven by an immediate emotional response to her surroundings, her process begins in a state close to self-erasure, where instinct takes precedence over deliberate structure. Layers accumulate and resist, marks appear and are partially buried, surfaces evolve unpredictably. Colours clash and harmonise without a predetermined outcome. What remains is unfiltered and deeply felt, never fully legible, asking to be sensed before it is read.

At the centre of this practice is a sustained inquiry into home, not as a fixed place but as something carried. A quality of light, a familiar gesture observed in a stranger, the particular density of an afternoon in a specific season. These fragments surface unexpectedly and briefly make the ground feel solid. Her work moves through and between these moments, holding them without resolving them.


This investigation is not confined to a single medium. Painting, drawing, text and image each enter the work as the question requires. What stays consistent is the quality of attention: to atmosphere, to sensory memory, to the way the interior landscape you carry shapes everything you see and everything you make. Upon completion, each work takes on its own presence, no longer belonging entirely to the studio or to its maker. That release is both essential and inevitable.