Sabine Moritz

They also both allude to famous paintings: Reader draws influences from Jan Vermeer's Woman in Blue Reading a Letter (1663/64) and Jean-Honoré Fragonard's A Young Girl Reading (c. 1776).

The Small Bather theme has an iconic predecessor in Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’ painting with the same title.

Sabine Moritz (born 1969 in Quedlinburg) is a German painter and graphic designer.

She is married to Gerhard Richter.

Sabine Moritz was born as the daughter of a chemist in East Germany.

These images depict Moritz’ formative years growing up in East Germany (1969–85).

Two years after having started her art studies, she started to process and come to terms with this time period by sketching her recollections of houses, squares and interiors and at times personal experiences from memory.

This extensive collection was naturally divided into two halves, the first dealing with Lobeda and the second with Jena.

Lobeda consists of over 100 mostly homogenous drawings, which appear to resemble diary entries.

Drawn with charcoal and pencil they are large monochrome images highlighting Moritz’ spatial awareness and keen interest in visualising the common, daily elements of life and in doing so giving them new meaning and gravitas.

JENA, Düsseldorf is the natural continuation, but also progression of Lobeda.

Produced in direct subsequence, this second series has a stronger personal feel about it.

Not only did the artist visit the locality of Lobeda after having finished the first series to revitalise her memory, she also engaged herself with photographs and snapshots from family albums and other images, which she felt had a visual relation to her memories.

Broadly speaking this series consists of two thematic focus points.

On the one hand the images clearly deal with the personal recollections of the artist ranging from her first day at school to the laboratory in which her father worked.

From 1973 to 1981 she lived together with her family in a high-density housing area of Lobeda in Neulobeda.

Before emigrating to West Germany in 1985 she lived in Jena for 4 years.

In 1988 she started her studies at the Hochschule für Gestaltung Offenbach (The Offenbach University of Art and Design) at the class of Adam Jankowski.

From 1991 she continued her studies at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf (Academy of Art Düsseldorf).

At first she was in the class of Markus Lüpertz but changed to Gerhard Richter’s in the following year.

In the years 1991 and 1992 she created the series of drawings Lobeda that consists of more than 100 pencil drawings.

She was the last student to be accepted to his class as he had planned to lay his teaching career to rest in 1994.

Two paintings – Reader (CR: 799-1 und 804) and Small Bather (CR: 815-1) from 1994 – depict her, although she remains anonymous through the non-descriptive titles.

Both these paintings were made from a photographic original just as Richter has created throughout his artistic career.

Sabine Moritz has been married to her former teacher, Gerhard Richter, since 1995.

They have three children and live in Cologne.

Gerhard Richter has used his wife in many paintings.

In 1995 Richter painted a series, which depict his wife with their eldest son Moritz as an infant known under the title S. with Child (CR: 827-1 bis 827-8).

These works can closely be associated with the Madonna with Child topos.

The publication Roses is a collection of 37 drawings created between 2004 and 2009 accompanied by two poems (The Green Windbreaker by Adam Zagajewski and The Sick Rose by William Blake).

Through the different usage of the media charcoal, pastels and oil pastels Moritz displays a versatile approach.

In 2009 they were discovered in the artist's studio by the curator Hans Ulrich Obrist and the publisher Walther König and subsequently published in 2010 by These works were shown in the Kunsthaus Sans Titre in Potsdam from August to September in 2011.

Later that year the book Jena, Düsseldorf was published, again by Walther König.

During a visit to the artist's studio in 2009 the curator of the Serpentine Gallery, London Hans Ulrich Obrist accidentally discovered a large amount of drawings from the early 1990s.

Richter's portrait of his wife Head (sketch) was sold at auction for US$2,33 million by Christie's in 2010.

Limbo is the catalogue accompanying the exhibition that was held at the Andrew Mummery Gallery, London from 15.2.

to 18.3.2006.

The two predominate themes are war and still lifes – orchids, roses, lilies in vases.

This series deals with the interspace, the limbo, between these two seemingly juxtaposed topics.

It is about balancing the beauty of the one with the horrors of the other and finding a way of coping with both.