Artists

Sabine Moritz

Press release

Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin, is pleased to present ROT GELB BLAU STAUB, a solo exhibition by Sabine Moritz, marking her inaugural exhibition with the gallery. Bringing together twelve large-format canvases arranged in groups of three, the artist's first quadraphonic oil painting, a smaller-scale still life, and a selection of early works on paper, the exhibition presents a miniature retrospective of Moritz's rich and varied oeuvre. Working in abstraction and figuration, the artist paints or draws on canvas and paper, across large and small scales, and in vivid or pared-down hues. Ostensibly disparate, her works demand a slow and intimate process of looking. In these moments of pause, recurring motifs, figures and forms gently come to the fore. Echoing like fragments of memory, her works begin to inform one another in subtle and surprising ways. Throughout her practice, Moritz demonstrates a continuous investigation into the complexities of the human condition. Drawing from subjects spanning history, mythology and poetry, she interweaves elements of personal memory with collective experience. Her early practice comprises mostly figurative compositions; yet abstraction prevails in her recent paintings. The works are rendered intuitively, without preliminary sketches. Some, including her body of twelve equally sized canvases, are entirely nonobjective. For example, in three Erde (Earth) paintings from this series, swathes of paint unfurl like fractured glass. As if driven by a rhythmic and emotive force, their rich, tactile surfaces present dense layers of brushwork and shifting fields of texture, colour and form. Rather than striving for compositional harmony, her haptic brushwork seems to capture a cadence, an atmosphere, or the transience of time. These twelve new paintings are loosely inspired by the four elements: fire, air, earth and water. Working across four groups of three, Moritz imbues her canvases with some essence of these primordial substances – in title, palette and character alike. Licks of paint flicker like flames, dissolve into vaporous whorls, lend an earthy heaviness, or swill in liquidy pools. Since 2023, Moritz has been introducing corporeal forms into some of her compositions, testing notions of the abstract-figurative divide. In her new monumental quadriptych, female bodies emerge in a kind of alchemy from gestural swathes and strokes of paint. Slipping in and out of focus, their contours gently dissolve, ebbing and flowing between pigment and form. Driven by instinct, Moritz paints freely and spontaneously. Her figures evoke associations with the canon of art history – from Titian to Picasso – as much as with raw emotion, sentiment and mood. Translating to 'RED YELLOW BLUE DUST', the title of the exhibition encapsulates Moritz's aesthetic and conceptual dialogue between colour and matter. In her paintings, dense areas built largely from primary colours seem to diffuse upwards, as if shifting between elemental forms. Light-filled daubs in sky-blue and rose-petal pink are offset by verdant greens and yellows in the artist's three Luft (Air) paintings. In the Feuer (Fire) works, a deep red smoulders at the centre of each canvas. From the jewel-like, dappled ground of Teach us to number our days II, three skulls materialise, forming an enduring memento mori. In the upper galleries of the exhibition space, Moritz's works on paper are presented in a Petersburg hanging. They brim with many of the figurative images and associations that have come to define her early practice: helicopters, ships and apartment blocks; singular flowers wilting or blooming on a stem; the lone figure of a child. Such references stem from her childhood memories of growing up in the GDR, as well as art-historical, social and political iconography, and recurring symbols of ephemerality. They permeate her drawings with the elusiveness of a dream. Drawn into the artist's world, the viewer is invited to linger and weave narratives from these momentary fragments of form. Sabine Moritz (b. 1969, Quedlinburg, Germany) lives and works in Cologne. Solo exhibitions of the artist's work have been held in international institutions including Le Château – Centre for Contemporary Art and Heritage of Aubenas; Olivia Foundation, Mexico City (both 2025); Kunsthalle Rostock (2019); Kunstverein Bremerhaven (2017); and Von der Heydt-Kunsthalle, Wuppertal-Barmen (2014), among others. Moritz's works are in the collections of The Broad, Los Angeles; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Dallas Museum of Art; FAMM – Female Artists of the Mougins Museum; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; K11 Art Foundation, Hong Kong; Kistefos Museum, Jevnaker; Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf; Lenbachhaus Munich; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest; Olivia Foundation, Mexico City; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Sifang Art Museum, Nanjing; and Tate, London, among others. The artist's work will be presented in a solo exhibition at the Garden Museum, London, from 8 October to 20 December 2026.