Sabine Moritz

Sabine Moritz was born in 1969 in Quedlinburg, East Germany, and moved to Darmstadt, West Germany in 1985. She studied at the Hochschule für Gestaltung Offenbach from 1989 before continuing her training at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf from 1991 under A. R. Penck, graduating in 1994. She has lived and worked in Cologne ever since. Her formation across two Germanys — the socialist East and the Federal West — has remained a persistent undercurrent in her practice, which moves fluidly between painting and works on paper, treating both with equal seriousness.

Among the foundational works of her career is Lobeda, a series of more than one hundred pencil drawings made between 1991 and 1992 that reconstructs the East German housing estate of the same name. The project transforms personal and political memory into a sustained documentary undertaking, establishing the terms — history, place, material accumulation — that continue to animate her work. That commitment to drawing alongside painting was made explicit in a 2018 exhibition presenting eighteen paintings and approximately sixty works on paper, offering a substantial cross-section of her practice at that moment. Her 2019 exhibition Sterne und Granit at Kunsthalle Rostock further situated her engagement with landscape, history, and materiality within a major German institutional context.

Moritz's exhibition record spans a wide range of institutions and galleries. Solo presentations have been held at Marian Goodman Gallery in Paris, Pilar Corrias in London, Gagosian in both Beverly Hills and Rome, HENI Leviathan in London, König Galerie in Berlin, Von der Heydt-Kunsthalle in Wuppertal-Barmen, and Kunstverein Bremerhaven, among others. In 2017 her work was included in Age of Terror: Art Since 9/11 at the Imperial War Museum in London. Looking ahead, 2026 brings both Rot Gelb Blau Staub at Galerie Max Hetzler in Berlin and Lie Down in Green Pastures at the Garden Museum in London — the latter marking her first solo exhibition at a UK museum. Her work is held in the permanent collections of Tate in London, the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus in Munich, the Von der Heydt-Museum in Wuppertal, the Deutsche Bank Collection in Frankfurt, the LVMH Collection in Paris, and the Aishti Foundation in Jal el Dib. She is represented by Gagosian, Marian Goodman Gallery, Galerie Max Hetzler, and Pilar Corrias.