Sabine Moritz

Sabine Moritz’s paintings and drawings centre around themes of memory both personal and collective. The passage of time is palpable across her oeuvre through recurrent motifs drawn from memories of her surroundings as well as documentary images. Moritz's works reveal a finely tuned approach to observing supposedly everyday, personal scenes from life and capturing them in such a way that a transcending moment seems to be inherent in them. The artist's recurring motifs are war, nature and still life, suburban settlements and figure, whereby the immediate surroundings serve as the most important source of her works, intertwining inner and outer perception. 

Moritz's early works in particular show references to her life experience in a specific place at a specific time. While studying at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Moritz produced a cycle of over 100 charcoal and coloured pencil drawings based on her memories of the prefabricated housing estate in the satellite town of Lobeda near Jena in the former GDR, where her family lived from 1973 to 1985. The pictures had almost been forgotten until they were rediscovered by Hans-Ulrich Obrist and Walther König during a visit to Moritz's studio in 2009. The scenes reconstruct a personal past, but also imply a more general, collective history. Later works carry less specific temporal and geographical connotations, such as Moritz's ongoing series of works on paper in oil and oil pastels, Hütte (2015-present), variations on a solitary structure in the Bavarian Alps. Since 2015, the artist’s practice has also explored abstract painting in a rich colour spectrum revealing energy, movement and rhythm.

"First see, then believe" is the artist's maxim for her work, for her œuvre, for the evaluation of her own paintings in their process of creation and for her understanding of the world. She describes her working method as "looking, correcting until it has the density and intensity that captivates you." (Robert Fleck)

Sabine Moritz was born in Quedlinburg in 1969 and emigrated from the German Democratic Republic to West Germany in 1985. She studied at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Offenbach and the Kunstakademie Duesseldorf. The artist lives and works in Cologne. Moritz's work has been exhibited in European institutions including De 11 Lijnen, Oudenburg, Belgium, Kunsthalle Rostock, Kunsthalle Bremerhaven, Von der Heydt Kunsthalle, Wuppertal, Germany.