Sabine Moritz

Sabine Moritz’s paintings, drawings, and prints appear timeless yet endlessly shifting, each a suspended moment that explores the complex workings of memory and emotion. By situating observations of her immediate surroundings alongside deconstructed and de-historicized documentary images, and adapting and repurposing a catalogue of symbolic motifs, Moritz ponders the fragile constitution and mercurial dynamics of recollection. Both figurative and abstract, her works enhance our sensitivity to the passage of time, locating personal experience within shared narratives to examine ideas of transience and decay.

Moritz was born in 1969 in Quedlinburg in East Germany. From 1973 to 1981, she lived in Jena-Lobeda, also in East Germany. In 1985, a few years prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall, she immigrated with her family to Darmstadt, in West Germany. In 1989 she enrolled at the Hochschule für Gestaltung Offenbach (Offenbach University of Art and Design). From 1991 she continued her studies at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf (Academy of Art Düsseldorf).

In her early years as a student between 1991 and 1992, Moritz produced Lobeda, a series of more than 150 monochrome pencil drawings in which she recalls her childhood in the titular satellite town, reconstructing from memory and varying details of the prefabricated housing estate her family lived in. The series is an exercise in learning to see and draw. From 1992 to 1994 Moritz expanded on this project with Jena Düsseldorf, which was inspired by a return visit to the area and derives additional imagery from the artist’s family photographs. Here, she works in color and in a painterly mode. All these drawings went unseen until 2009, when curator Hans Ulrich Obrist and publisher Walther König discovered them in her studio. In 2010 they published the first selection, Lobeda, and in 2011, the second, Jena Düsseldorf. Both books were partially expanded and republished in 2021.