Views of the exhibition “Sabine Moritz: Ara” curated by Diana Nawi. Photos by Sergio Lopez, courtesy of The Olivia Foundation. All artworks © Sabine Moritz.
Ara is Sabine Moritz’s first exhibition in Mexico, featuring works from the Olivia Collection alongside recent pieces that explore a range of visual vocabularies. Anchored by major new paintings that push her abstractions toward imagery, the exhibition also includes works where gesture and mark-making charge or dissolve representational depictions. This marks Olivia Foundation’s first solo exhibition of an artist’s work, extending its conversation with those represented in depth within the collection.
Views of the exhibition “Sabine Moritz: Ara” curated by Diana Nawi. Photos by Sergio Lopez, courtesy of The Olivia Foundation. All artworks © Sabine Moritz.
Ara is a constellation in the southern sky. In Greek mythology, its stars—dots of light in the night—form an altar. Constellations, a recurring motif in Moritz’s work, offer a fitting metaphor for our impulse to find imagery where none may exist, imbuing abstract points of light with historical and cultural narratives. Moritz’s practice explores how meaning emerges from the tension between abstraction and representation, allowing us to see and name what is before us while providing resonant forms for inarticulable memories, ideas, and experiences—whether individual or collective, fleeting or timeless.
The works on display—across subject, style, and scale—reflect Moritz’s ability to orchestrate multiple visual vocabularies into singular, precisely tuned expressions. Major new paintings push the staccato and fluid rhythms of her abstractions toward imagery, while others use gesture and mark-making to complicate or obscure representation. *Ara* is also the name of a species of macaws, parrots native to Mexico and Central and South America. Known for their vivid plumage, they echo Moritz’s luminous palette—yet remain unseen. Churning abstractions lend a charged vitality to melancholic images of dogs and still lifes of flowers, compelling us to seek signs and symbols in paintings that resist the pictorial.
Sabine Moritz. Portrait by Albrecht Fuchs. Courtesy of the artist and Gagosian.
About the Artist
Sabine Moritz was born in 1969 in Quedlinburg, East Germany, and studied at Hochschule für Gestaltung, Düsseldorf, and Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. She has had recent solo exhibitions at Gagosian, Los Angeles; Marian Goodman Gallery, New York; Hyundai Gallery, Seoul; Pilar Corrias Gallery, London; König Galerie, Berlin; Kunsthalle, Rostock, Germany; and K21, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, among others. She has been included in recent group exhibitions at such venues as Kunsthalle Halle, Emden, Germany; Imperial War Museum, London; Neues Museum Nürnberg, Germany; and Cultuurcentrum, Mechelen, Belgium. Moritz lives and works in Cologne.