This autumn, the Garden Museum will hold contemporary German artist Sabine Moritz’s first UK museum exhibition. Reflecting on her childhood in East Germany, Moritz explores memories and encounters with the natural world through richly textured sketches and canvases, the majority of which have not been exhibited before.
Several of the works in this exhibition draw on Moritz’s recollections of growing up in Neulobeda, a satellite town filled with concrete-slab housing, where her family moved following the death of her father. Dealing with grief, Moritz searched for solace beyond the city, exploring the surrounding hills and countryside.
Moritz now lives and works in Cologne. She keeps potted plants and vases of fresh flowers, which inspire her ongoing series of floral still life paintings. In recent years, she has also explored relationships with the natural world through an almost total abstraction, demonstrated in a vast piece created especially for this exhibition.
Moritz, whose work was described by curator Hans Ulrich Obrist in 2013 as “memories made visual – the fleeting impulses of the past rendered concrete in art”, has been widely exhibited in group and solo exhibitions in Düsseldorf, Brussels, Paris and London. Her work is included in prominent collections including the Aïshti Foundation, Jal El Dib; LVMH, Paris; and Tate, UK.
This exhibition is supported by Pilar Corrias.
