PREVIEW: Sabine Moritz-Frost

Sabine Moritz’s paintings, drawings, and prints appear timeless yet endlessly shifting, each a suspended moment that explores the complex workings of memory. 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.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Gagosian Archive

Both figurative and abstract, Sabine Moritz’s works enhance our sensitivity to the passage of time, locating personal experience within shared narratives to examine ideas of transience and decay. Since 2015, Moritz has increasingly worked in an abstract mode, creating paintings that she dubs “psychological landscapes,” titled after elements, locations, months, seasons, and mythological entities. In these works, overlapping brushstrokes are allied with chromatic contrasts in improvised compositions. Searching for primal sensory experience, Moritz avoids preliminary sketching, confronting the viewer instead with an unmediated dialogue between color and gesture that addresses recollection and history in a consciously oblique, ambiguous manner. In the twenty new canvases on view her solo exhibition “Frost”, Moritz presents dense arrays of painterly marks that harness the emotional power of color while retaining a consistent visual rhythm. With titles that refer to time and place, and to poetry—”And the lovers lie abed, with all their griefs in their arms (D. T.)” (2024) is taken from Dylan Thomas’s ars poetica “In My Craft or Sullen Art,” from his 1946 collection Deaths and Entrances—the works repay extended looking. Moritz applies pigment vigorously and in layers, sometimes as impasto, which is then scraped back to imbue the surface with a varied texture. Engineering collisions between shape and hue, she sometimes also suggests figures emerging from or disappearing into the works’ interlocking patterns. This establishes references to artists of different epochs who have integrated the human form into landscape paintings. Like frost, which seems suspended between liquid and solid conditions, Moritz’s figures exist in an enigmatic liminal state. Sabine Moritz was born in 1969 in Quedlinburg, between Hannover and Leipzig, in East Germany. From 1973 to 1981, she lived in Lobeda, near Jena, 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 1988 she enrolled at the Hochschule für Gestaltung Offenbach (Offenbach University of Art and Design), where she studied under Adam Jankowski. From 1991 she continued her studies at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf (Academy of Art Düsseldorf), initially under Markus Lüpertz, then under Gerhard Richter. Between 1991 and 1992, Moritz produced “Lobeda”, a series of 149 large-scale monochrome pencil and charcoal drawings that remained unseen until 2009 when Hans Ulrich Obrist discovered them in her studio. “Lobeda” was published in 2010 by Buchhandlung Walther König and exhibited at the Kunsthaus sans titre, Potsdam, in 2011. The works depict everyday scenes from Moritz’s formative years in “Lobeda” and “Neulobeda”. A subsequent series, “JENA Düsseldorf” (2011), was inspired by a return visit to the area and derives additional imagery from the artist’s family photographs. It pictures Moritz’s memories of special moments, including her first day at school, as well as public sites that are significant to the region’s broader history. Two outwardly divergent motifs of ongoing importance to Moritz are flowers and helicopters. The former—asters, orchids, roses, and lilies—are the subjects of several series; “Roses” (2004–09) collects thirty-seven charcoal, pastel, and oil pastel drawings of the blooms, while a set of drawings of lilies also incorporates images of decorative objects, emphasizing the flowers’ quasi-architectural quality and their function within domestic interiors. A collection of paintings and drawings of helicopters made between 2002 and 2013 is derived from newspaper and television images. Examining a perceived change in the aircrafts’ symbolism, it intersects with a group of paintings addressing conflict and war that Moritz began in 2004. Moritz has also produced improvisational abstract paintings and drawings since 2015. She dubs these works “mental landscapes,” and presents them as addressing her enduring themes of memory and history in a consciously ambiguous manner inspired by the natural environment. As the title of one series, “Lair” (2022), suggests, she considers such painting a refuge—a place from which to observe the world uninterrupted. In pursuit of primal sensory experiences, Moritz executes abstract paintings without making preliminary sketches and titles them after seasons, months, elements, regions, and mythological or cosmic entities. These works confront the viewer with a dialogue between colors and gestures, in which overlapping brushstrokes are allied with chromatic contrasts that embody an intense visual freedom. In works on paper such as the series “Shostakovich” (2022), the interplay of foreground and background operates in concert with the impact of varied marks and hues. More recently, Moritz has begun to incorporate suggestions of figures into the compositions’ interlocking patterns and to use titles that reference time and place, as well as poetry.

Photo: Sabine Moritz, October I-IV, 2023, Oil on canvas in 4 parts, each: 39 3/8 x 39 3/8 inches (100.0 x 100.0 cm), © Sabine Moritz, Photo: Georgios Michaloudisl Courtesy of the artist and Gagosian

Info: Gagosian Gallery, 456 North Camden Drive, Beverly Hills, CA, USA, Duration: 8/11-21/12/2024, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-17:30, https://gagosian.com/