Sabine Moritz at the Garden Museum: memory, plants, painting

The exhibition spans three decades, with deliberate gaps, and includes rarely shown works such as Institute I and Institute II, painted in 1993 while Moritz was studying at the Düsseldorf Academy of Art. She says she was then teaching herself to paint in oils, while already trying to build intensity into the image.

What holds the show together is not a single theme but a way of looking. Moritz returns to plants, windows, trees and gardens as places where she watches what grows, what survives and what comes back; she also says she often drew whatever she could see outside when she was stuck in the studio.

For artists and drawing enthusiasts, the exhibition is compelling because it shows how memory, observation and invention can feed one another. The Lobeda line drawings, made from recollection, sit alongside botanical studies and later paintings in which nature becomes a site for formal testing, with fragile balances and repeated adjustments.

Moritz also links her work to Robert Capa’s 1947 photographs of harvest scenes in Ukraine, which led her to paint an image of a child over and over again. That motif, like the flowers and weeds in her drawings, points to the painter’s craft: revisiting a form, varying it, and letting it shift into something else.