Sabine Moritz: August

This book was published on the occasion of Sabine Moritz: August at Gagosian, Rome, the artist’s first exhibition with the gallery and her Italian debut.

In paintings, drawings, and prints, Moritz juxtaposes interpretations of her immediate surroundings and the natural world with narrative elements and, in improvised “psychological landscapes,” an increasing degree of gestural abstraction. In August, which included the artist’s four largest paintings to date, she employed repetition and difference to consider the persistence of beauty and hope. Alluding to Ovid’s Metamorphoses alongside art historical sources, the exhibition’s works also evoke liminal states by incorporating semi-obscured figures; in referring to Titian’s rendition of the encounter between Artemis and Actaeon, for example, Moritz addresses themes of human fragility, sensuality, and strength, while suggesting a sense of longing for a lost idyll.

Fully illustrated with color plates, details, and installation photography, the book features a text by Hans Ulrich Obrist, artistic director of Serpentine, London, and poems by Gottfried Benn, Friedrich Hölderlin, and Dylan Thomas that directly influenced a number of the paintings included in August.