Rome, Gagosian Gallery features Sabine Moritz with the exhibition August

Sabine Moritz (Quedlinburg, 1969), one of Germany’s leading contemporary artists, is featured in Gagosian ’s Rome branch with the exhibition August, on view through Nov. 11. It is the artist’s first exhibition with the gallery and her first in Italy. Moritz’s body of paintings, drawings and works on paper represents a succession of suspended moments, in which the artist, in his older works, places deconstructed documentary images alongside his interpretation of his surroundings and the natural world; while in his more recent paintings he presents a more narrative approach reinforced by the paintings’ large horizontal format. By adapting and modifying an inventory of symbolic and abstract motifs, Moritz reflects on the fickle dynamics of impermanence and memory. His works intensify our sensitivity to the passage of time, situating personal experience in shared narratives.

Since 2015 Moritz has been working in an increasingly abstract style, producing improvised paintings and drawings that he calls “psychological landscapes.” In these works, the artist addresses the recurring themes of memory and history in a consciously ambiguous way, inspired by perceptual processes. Seeking the primal sensory experience, the artist avoids preliminary sketches, confronting the viewer with a dialogue between color and gesture.

In Moritz’s most recent canvases, dense overlapping brushstrokes are paired with color contrasts to express intense visual freedom. Applying paint vigorously and in layers-sometimes as impasto that he then scrapes off to give surfaces a varied texture-Moritz often privileges the collision of forms and hues over compositional harmony, always maintaining a visual rhythm. In the paintings exhibited in Rome, among which are four of the largest made by the artist to date, Moritz again plays with probability and associations of repetition and difference to consider the continuing possibility of hope and beauty even in the most difficult circumstances. The works in August allude to Ovid’s Metamorphoses and a variety of sources from art history.

Evoking liminal states of being and figures in transition, the works in the exhibition incorporate semi-obscure figures that seem to emerge from abstract compositions with understated, almost natural colors. Alluding to the Titian interpretation of the encounter between Artemis and Actaeon, for example, the artist addresses themes of human frailty, sensuality and strength, evoking a sense of nostalgia for a lost idyll. With Actaeon’s End (2023), the artist repeats the custom of beginning each exhibition with a link to the previous one, maintaining a vital continuum between each project.

For all information, you can visit the official Gagosian Gallery website.

Pictured: Sabine Moritz, Ferragosto I (2023; oil on canvas, 200 x 300 cm) Photo: Georgios Michaloudis

Rome, Gagosian Gallery features Sabine Moritz with the exhibition August

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