Claus Georg Stabe unmemory
Berlin 13 Feb – 21 Mar 2026
Exhibition opening on Friday, 13 February 2026, 5–9 p.m.
Unmemory
As a child, I had a pretty concrete image of how I would act as a father—unconditional love, passionate devotion. I would show my children the beauty of the world, explain the interconnectedness of things, be their best friend, always have time for them, approach them whenever I sensed something was wrong. Under no circumstances would I allow them to feel lost or misunderstood in my presence. I would not be like my own father, who was distant from me and to whom I was a stranger. I would be different.
I could stop here. After all, this little, somewhat sad story does not lack causal connections to be considered complete: this is how such things come about—a positive image of the future self, generated from a negative present experience, stabilizing the subject. But I have omitted a crucial part of this story, the one that led to the vivid imagination of my future self, namely the decisive influence of my mediated memories in this projection: I had watched countless American movies and series, had read dozens of books featuring exactly the kind of fathers I wanted to be. I longed for them, and since I could hardly reshape my own father, they became my role models.
Looking into art history, being shaped by teachers and other artists, and the idea of the ideal image generally serve in the here and now of artistic production as stabilizers, enabling a positive expectation for the future—in this case, the outcome. Claus Stabe, however, deliberately denies himself this stability in his current artistic practice. He questions his own visual and technical conditioning and influence, works against it, and forbids it, as far as possible, from gaining any space. He wants to learn to forget, has actively chosen a process of fading concerning the past, and wants to experience how, in the here and now of the pictorial process, his artistic identity—freed from historical baggage—materializes and de-fictionalizes itself again and again.
When I actually became a father, the memories of the fictional, idealized Hollywood super-dads faded within me—they no longer served to stabilize my present self or positive projections into the future. I learned that neither bad nor good role models were useful to me, that only the here and now exists, in which I exist together with my child, and I learned that I must relinquish any self-conception. Stabe, too, refuses to follow any idea suspected of not being his own, but stemming from some form of conditioning. Today, artistic freedom is primarily a legal term, applied to works, but it actually describes a possibly unattainable state reached at the end of an emancipatory process, which does not manifest in the gallery space but is actively experienced in the studio. Artistic freedom means forgetting who you wanted to be, forgetting what others wanted you to become. To forget is to pull the ground out from under yourself. Allegedly, the resulting lack of grounding irrevocably leads to free fall. For a father, this may be true, since there are socially meaningful agreements concerning the scope of action of so-called caregivers. But as an artist, one may take off, fly away, and create something that surpasses both one’s own and our collective imagination, something new, something breathtaking. Impossible, you say? Well, art history proves otherwise. But—oops—we wanted to learn to forget. See how hard that is?
– Carsten Tabel, 2026
Unmemory
As a child, I had a pretty concrete image of how I would act as a father—unconditional love, passionate devotion. I would show my children the beauty of the world, explain the interconnectedness of things, be their best friend, always have time for them, approach them whenever I sensed something was wrong. Under no circumstances would I allow them to feel lost or misunderstood in my presence. I would not be like my own father, who was distant from me and to whom I was a stranger. I would be different.
I could stop here. After all, this little, somewhat sad story does not lack causal connections to be considered complete: this is how such things come about—a positive image of the future self, generated from a negative present experience, stabilizing the subject. But I have omitted a crucial part of this story, the one that led to the vivid imagination of my future self, namely the decisive influence of my mediated memories in this projection: I had watched countless American movies and series, had read dozens of books featuring exactly the kind of fathers I wanted to be. I longed for them, and since I could hardly reshape my own father, they became my role models.
Looking into art history, being shaped by teachers and other artists, and the idea of the ideal image generally serve in the here and now of artistic production as stabilizers, enabling a positive expectation for the future—in this case, the outcome. Claus Stabe, however, deliberately denies himself this stability in his current artistic practice. He questions his own visual and technical conditioning and influence, works against it, and forbids it, as far as possible, from gaining any space. He wants to learn to forget, has actively chosen a process of fading concerning the past, and wants to experience how, in the here and now of the pictorial process, his artistic identity—freed from historical baggage—materializes and de-fictionalizes itself again and again.
When I actually became a father, the memories of the fictional, idealized Hollywood super-dads faded within me—they no longer served to stabilize my present self or positive projections into the future. I learned that neither bad nor good role models were useful to me, that only the here and now exists, in which I exist together with my child, and I learned that I must relinquish any self-conception. Stabe, too, refuses to follow any idea suspected of not being his own, but stemming from some form of conditioning. Today, artistic freedom is primarily a legal term, applied to works, but it actually describes a possibly unattainable state reached at the end of an emancipatory process, which does not manifest in the gallery space but is actively experienced in the studio. Artistic freedom means forgetting who you wanted to be, forgetting what others wanted you to become. To forget is to pull the ground out from under yourself. Allegedly, the resulting lack of grounding irrevocably leads to free fall. For a father, this may be true, since there are socially meaningful agreements concerning the scope of action of so-called caregivers. But as an artist, one may take off, fly away, and create something that surpasses both one’s own and our collective imagination, something new, something breathtaking. Impossible, you say? Well, art history proves otherwise. But—oops—we wanted to learn to forget. See how hard that is?
– Carsten Tabel, 2026
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