Painting the invisible

Iztok Schwab — who works under the name Don Schwab — was born in Slovenia in 1965. He spent an important period of his early life living and working in London and Amsterdam. Exposure to different artistic and cultural environments shaped his sensitivity to space, material, atmosphere and understated visual storytelling. After returning to Slovenia, he continued developing his independent practice while also working with interiors, murals and architectural spaces.

For more than three decades he has been developing Liminal Archives, an expanding artistic universe in which every painting exists as part of a larger, interconnected whole. Rather than offering a fixed narrative, his works create atmospheric environments filled with fragments, figures, structures and traces of worlds that appear to be forming, disappearing or transforming.

Schwab approaches painting intuitively. Using collage, layered materials, textured surfaces and a variety of painting media, he allows each image to develop through a gradual process of construction, erosion and discovery. A painting is rarely based on a completely predetermined composition. Instead, forms and relationships slowly reveal themselves as the work evolves.

At the heart of his practice is the search for a feeling — something that cannot always be explained directly, but can be experienced through colour, space, texture and atmosphere. His paintings exist between abstraction and representation, inviting viewers to slow down, enter the image and form their own interpretation.

For Schwab, art is not simply a profession. It is a lifelong necessity, a way of understanding experience and giving form to things that would otherwise remain invisible.