2022.3.11 – 4.24
Sabine Moritz

Gallery Hyundai is proud to present Raging Moon, the first solo exhibition in Asia by Sabine Moritz (b. 1969), a German painter who has been drawing worldwide attention with her exhibitions at major galleries and institutions in Europe. This large-scale exhibition features around 50 works from Moritz’s figurative and abstraction paintings and etching series produced between 2015 and 2022, spotlighting the ways in which she has experimented in flexible ways with the traditional genre and medium of painting.

Moritz’s practice focuses on the mutable, fragmentary memories of individuals and groups and the abstract landscapes formed from those memories. Having embarked on a dense exploration of historical and political landscapes with her figurative paintings showing the horrors of war and her childhood experiences in Lobeda—part of the former East Germany—Moritz has focused on “mental landscapes” with her abstract paintings since 2015. She has been lauded by critics for her alluring abstract images, achieved through dynamic brushstrokes; delicate gradations of color within a single stroke; coarse and primitive “nonlinear lines” applied in impasto; and the eclectic sensory collisions triggered by the multiple layers of color and their pronounced material qualities. The artist has said that while her figurative paintings are expressions of concrete experiences, spaces, and thoughts, her abstract paintings “focus on human and sensory realms that are not universal, transporting them into a spiritual world.”

The exhibition Raging Moon focuses on Moritz’s original creative approach, which nimbly moves “again and again” from figurative to abstract and from abstract to figurative. Her abstract painting works are the highlight of the exhibition, evoking startling excitement with their dazzling feast of colors. Richly stimulating the viewer’s feelings and imagination, her abstract paintings bear striking titles that reference the four seasons (Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter), the month when her exhibition is held (March), natural elements (Land, Wood, and Wind), the natural environment of a particular region (Baltic Sea), and mythological and cosmic entities (Andromeda and Cassiopeia). To commemorate her first solo exhibition in Asia, Moritz suggested the number “4” as a concept for the exhibition. In contrast with its meaning in the East, the number “4” signifies order and stability in the West: the four cardinal directions, the seasons, the concept of justice in Pythagorean cosmology. Placed side by side in groups of four on the gallery’s walls, abstract works like March, Land, Wood, and Wind appear before the viewer as sets reminiscent of a series—or perhaps a family.

In addition to the abstract paintings, the exhibition features figurative paintings that attempt an endless intellectual and aesthetic dialogue with the traditions of Western art history as expressed by landscape art and still-life images with a “memento mori” message. It also includes works of etching in which bold yet delicate color is applied in oil paintings and crayon over etched renderings of the same objects, including roses and trees.

Gallery Hyundai
14 Samcheong-ro, Jongno-gu, Seoul, Korea
+82 2 2287 3500

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