Sabine Moritz
Neuland
09.07. – 27.08.2017

A dog stands alone on a street. In the background is a seemingly deserted town. The motif seems familiar. Maybe not exactly this one, but the situation. It is haunting. The image is haunting. The location remains unclear. It is possibly interchangeable. In any case, the motif evokes memories and associations. But they are difficult to grasp precisely. What was just clear and distinct takes on shades and nuances when you think about it further. And this also corresponds to the image. The mental uncertainty corresponds to the blurriness of the painting style. With her strong, colorful painting style, the Cologne-based painter Sabine Moritz (born 1969) sometimes dissolves the motifs to the point of being recognizable.

A photo would probably have been clearer. A photo, as the saying goes, is worth a thousand words. The fixed moment, the fixed motif, could be recognized more clearly, grasped more quickly and, yes, even assessed more quickly. But the world is sometimes not so clear, so quickly fixable. What if a thousand words are to be initiated, what if the aim is not to recognize this specific situation, a specific motif, but rather a more fundamental consideration? And what if the result of the consideration is to remain open, if no evaluation is to be made? Then a photo would probably not be the appropriate medium. And so, for Sabine Moritz, photos are only a starting point for her pictures.

Another starting point is memories. They are more fragile by nature. There are very clear, unambiguous memories, but also doubts and uncertainties. In memory, contexts, sizes and spaces shift. Precise ideas, superficial and dominant, stand on an equal footing with timid, questionable possibilities. In Sabine Moritz’s oeuvre, this is clear in the pencil and colored pencil drawings on paper that she has made since 1992, in which personal references are combined with the history of the two German states under the title Lobeda and Jena/Düsseldorf.

But the assessment of the weekly magazine Der Spiegel applies equally to the more open drawings as well as to the colored paintings. They are “works full of coolness, full of piercing emotions. Works of the highest quality.” In the exhibition Neuland, the Kunsthalle Bremerhaven is now presenting a selection of her intense paintings, drawings and graphics for the first time in the northwest.

Curated by Dr. Kai Kähler.