Sabine Moritz: “Everybody has an August, everybody has a midnight”

For her recent show at Gagosian’s coliseum-proportioned gallery on Via Francesco Crispi in Rome, German artist Sabine Moritz looked to Italian summer holidays and the rhythms of the four seasons for inspiration. But Moritz’s Italy is not the Italy of gelato and Barolo but of blood, guts, gore, and a little lyric poetry. Moritz is one of the most adventurous abstract artists working today; her recent works are bold, beaming compositions that are at once fiercely gestural and intellectually controlled. Following her show, Matthew Holman spoke to her about colour, the flow state, and the enduring myth of a scorned woman who turns a man into a stag, before getting his own hunting dogs to rip him apart.

Matthew Holman: I understand that both of your parents were chemists. I couldn’t help but think about you as a child in the back room, exposed like the child of chemists might be to all their colours, combinations, liquids, experiments and alchemy. How was this experience growing up?

Sabine Moritz: Well, my mother studied chemistry but only practised for a short time; my father died young. I have only rough memories or small memories. But I suppose I share something with the chemical researcher and the experimenter. When I’m in my work, I am both very rational and very irrational.

MH: How does this pan out in a normal day in the studio?

SM: I have a large showroom and a room where I work, and a closet where I get changed. Painting is such a dirty business. It’s always a little cold here, too, in my Cologne studio. Importantly, I can never work on one painting at once. I must always start and continue, start and continue, on a sequence of paintings. I’m always trying to reach the flow state of things: when I am working and not thinking, not taking phone calls or all the things that creep up on you. When I am in that state, I am perfectly happy.

MH: I’m interested in your title, ‘August’, for the recent show in Rome. ‘August’ means many things: respected and impressive, the season of high summer, a German common name and, when in Rome, it is synonymous with the first imperial emperor (and the first benefactor of the Ferragosto celebrations, the Italian worker’s holiday, which you provide as the name for several works). When you close your eyes and think of ‘August’, what do you see?

SM: Well, we opened the exhibition in Rome during the month of August, and all your interpretations were in my mind, but I started out with a different title: ‘The Dying World.’ Now, this was very pessimistic and too tough. One of my children said: “Mom, you can’t use this, it’s too depressive” So, I settled on ‘August.’ August is the turning point of the year, as the transition from summer to autumn, and the period of celebration, carnivals and holidays. But I’ve always thought about my paintings in relation to time: I’ve completed works with titles like February, March, December, and two works in the Rome show are called Midnight and Noon. Everybody has an August, everybody has a midnight.

MH: August features your four largest paintings to date. Why so big? Why now?

SM: Oh that’s very easy, Matthew. It’s the space. I’ve never had the possibility to exhibit in such a huge space. It’s over 22 metres, and I thought: I must make four big canvases, which became a clear concept. The space dictates the size. Genauso.

MH: The Roman poet Ovid and his long epic The Metamorphoses influenced these works, and some of your titles borrow from his poem. Cy Twombly, another honorary Roman, and with whom your paintings are sometimes compared, made abstract paintings about Ovid’s poem, too. It’s an impossible task to summarise the poem, but we might say it is partly about the human need to transform chaos into order. Why Ovid? What can Ovid teach us today?

SM: I’m no connoisseur but I love these fables, these stories. I like to use metaphor, and in Ovid, the good thing comes in a bad thing and then the bad thing comes in a good thing. It’s an endless way of life. My paintings try to represent life and death in the same image: you are always confronted by these very brutal and sad things in the poems, but they are not ugly like in the world we know. For example, in Actaeon’s End (2023), which takes its name from the hunter who becomes the hunted when he is transformed from a man to a stag, I paint the last seconds of Actaeon’s life. The wolves tear him apart as they would a stag. It is the story of a person who lets others suffer, and then he feels the opposite side. He becomes a kind of animal. Just like us. That’s what the painting becomes.

MH: I am sure you are still catching your breath from Rome but what is next for you? What is the next body of work?

SM: This is something that I learned after my first or second exhibition: when I did a lot of work, and the studio was empty, I would get so depressed. I have already started on some new paintings, and I must once more experiment with my figures, which will be shown at Pilar Corrias next year. I must always continue immediately. I will have some time to play around, but then I will feel the pressure.

MH: As I am sure you are too, I’m tired of critics always going on about artists being ‘somewhere between abstraction and figuration.’ But I must ask about the figure in these new works, in Rome and in those that you just described, because the figure has come back to your work after some time away. Why?

SM: The last time I spoke with [German art historian] Benjamin Buchloh, he asked about the abstractions. And I said to him, “Sometimes people say: ‘Oh, yes, these look like flowers’, and I say, ‘No, there are never flowers.’”’ He said: “Yes, when you want to paint the flower, you paint a flower.” Art is like this. When I want to represent the object in the painting, I paint the object. Right now, I am experimenting with putting figures in abstractions once again, but it is difficult. It’s like there are two banks, figuration on one side and abstraction on the other, and a river between. The river is obstinate. It takes time to cross.