Sabine Moritz's First Italian Solo Show at Gagosian Rome

Sabine Moritz, born in 1969 in Quedlinburg, East Germany, emigrated with her family across the Berlin Wall as a teenager, just a few years before its fall in 1989. Her first solo exhibition in Italy, hosted by Gagosian in Rome, presents thirty-four works including drawings, works on paper, and large-format paintings. The earliest cycle, from 1991–92 while she studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, focuses on the difficult and fragile memories of her childhood in the communist bloc. Moritz describes her compositions as "psychological landscapes," "stories," and "visions," often giving them literary titles. Her neo-informal painting employs vibrant chromaticism and gestural brushwork, producing fiery explosions on large surfaces that extend boundaries and emanate energy and warmth, while simultaneously conveying rhythm, form, and depth. The works explore variations on a motif—whether personal experience, documentary image, or surrounding environment—as an attempt to capture time's impressions on memory and reveal their shifting allegorical meanings. The exhibition documents the recent evolution of this memory-processing experiment, utilizing a German Expressionist toolkit ranging from historical avant-gardes to the formal eclecticism of Gerhard Richter, her former teacher at Düsseldorf and later life partner. This approach also investigates the narrative possibilities of abstraction, maintaining a balanced equilibrium between symbol and its articulation.