ARTIST STATEMENT
I am drawn to the moment when the human will to master the world meets the quiet, indifferent resistance of matter, time, and entropy — and loses.
My paintings depict tools and machines: a fisherman's cart draped with netting, a Lausitz bucket-wheel excavator eaten by rust, a bowl of quinces sealed behind its own curved walls. These are objects built to extend human reach — to transport, to extract, to contain. Yet in every case the project fails, or rather succeeds only partially. The nets slide and arrange themselves by gravity. Corrosion returns steel to the earth. The bowl keeps its contents in, but also keeps everything else out.
I grew up in the German Democratic Republic — a state whose entire architecture was an exercise in control: of movement, of information, of thought. On 22 February 1985, aged 22, I was stripped of my GDR citizenship and crossed into the Federal Republic. The paintings I had made in Jena were confiscated by the Staatssicherheit. I know from personal experience what it costs to live inside a closed system, and what it costs to leave one.
That experience shapes everything I paint. When I depict a pre-war excavator from the open-cast lignite mines of the Niederlausitz — a machine that devoured entire villages in the name of the regime's hunger for raw materials — I am not painting nostalgia or industrial archaeology. I am painting the recurring human fantasy that nature, or society, or history can be wholly subdued. The rust answers that fantasy.
My formal choices reinforce this argument. I render each object with painstaking precision — oil on canvas, built layer by layer in the manner the medium demands — and then place it against a background reduced to a single flat plane of colour. The contrast is deliberate: the hyper-specific against the radically generic, the particular against the poster. The result feels slightly surreal, slightly estranged, as if the object has been extracted from time and submitted for examination.
I choose oil because it is itself a technology for mastery — the painter's attempt to fix light, texture, and time on a surface that will outlast them. It is a craft that resists shortcuts and rewards patience. I take that seriously. But I also know that even the most carefully varnished canvas will eventually crack.
What I want from a painting is a question, not an answer: Who controls what? What gets sacrificed in the name of order? What happens to a society that stops tolerating the friction of difference? The objects I paint hold those questions without explaining them. That is the work I ask them to do.
PERSONAL
Born 1962, Zittau, Saxony, GDR. Grew up in Hoyerswerda; moved to Jena 1980
Lives and works in Auggen, Baden-Württemberg (since February 2026; previously Freiburg im Breisgau 1985–2026)
Signs work as"22" — a number that has accompanied his life with uncanny consistency: he lived at Oberlauengasse 22, Jena from 1981 until — the day he was stripped of GDR citizenship on 22 February 1985, aged 22; returned to painting in 2022.
EDUCATION & TRAINING
1981–1985 Studies in Medicine, Friedrich Schiller University Jena (GDR)
1985–1987 Medical illustration training, Federal Republic of Germany
1987–1995 Freelance medical illustrator; exclusive work for Georg Thieme Verlag, Stuttgart
PROFESSIONAL BACKGROUND
1995–2017 Founder and Managing Director, new media agency specialising in digital communications and interactive media (22+ years)
2010–2026 Head of Academy, Industry & Commerce Association, Freiburg — directing professional development programmes
2022 – Returns to painting and drawing as primary occupation
ARTISTIC PRACTICE
Fabian works primarily in oil on canvas and ink on paper, approaching both disciplines as craft — demanding technical discipline alongside conceptual clarity. His canvases combine hyper-precise rendering of industrial and everyday objects with radically reduced background planes, producing a tension between the particular and the universal that gives his work its distinctive, almost surrealist charge.
His subjects — corroded machinery, fishing nets, obsolete agricultural equipment, bowls of fruit — are chosen for their capacity to carry ideas: the hubris of human mastery over nature, the inevitability of entropy, and the political fragility of open societies. Growing up in the GDR and crossing into the Federal Republic in 1985 informs a practice preoccupied with the tension between order and chaos, between the will to control and the forces that undo it.
SELECTED EXHIBITIONS
1983 Solo exhibition, Hochschule für Musik Franz Liszt, Weimar, GDR
1984 Solo exhibition, Stadtkirche St. Martin, Jena, GDR
Note: The majority of works created during the Jena period were confiscated by the GDR Staatssicherheit (Secret Police) and remain untraced. One surviving object is held in a private collection in Chicago, USA.
2022 – Selected works in private collections, Germany and internationally
