Overview
On the occasion of Art Basel 2026, Pilar Corrias is pleased to present a solo booth of new work by Sabine Moritz. The presentation precedes Moritz’s forthcoming exhibition at the Garden Museum, London, opening 7 October 2026.
Created especially for the fair, this new body of work comprises a series of large-scale abstract paintings and works on paper that builds on themes explored in Moritz’s 2025 exhibition The Sleep of Tomorrow (Pilar Corrias, Conduit Street, 2025), in which the artist first brought together two distinct strands of her practice: figurative and abstract painting.
The central work, The Melancholy of the Wind, references Édouard Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe depicting a park scene that unfolds through layers of vibrant, dynamic brushwork. Shifting fields of texture and colour generate a sense of movement and atmosphere, while reclining figures emerge and recede, hovering between foreground and background as though carved from the paint itself, at times sculptural and at others dissolving into the surrounding colour. Gardens and motifs drawn from nature feature heavily throughout Moritz’s practice. Drawing in part on the Romanticist concept of nature, she frequently refers to literary and poetry in which nature is represented as a dynamic organism without static form. The titles of several works - Spring, Puck's Breakfast and Sweet little Garden of Paradise - point to this as a throughline throughout the presentation.
Notable among the presentation are three still lifes depicting skulls: figurative works that while remaining decipherable, begin to veer into abstraction. The inclusion of skulls, a recurring motif in Moritz’s practice, serves as a meditation on impermanence, mortality and the passing of time. In two of the works, Moritz includes lemons, rendered in vivid yellow, offering moments of brightness and vitality.
On the occasion of Art Basel 2026, Pilar Corrias is pleased to present a solo booth of new work by Sabine Moritz. The presentation precedes Moritz’s forthcoming exhibition at the Garden Museum, London, opening 7 October 2026.
Created especially for the fair, this new body of work comprises a series of large-scale abstract paintings and works on paper that builds on themes explored in Moritz’s 2025 exhibition The Sleep of Tomorrow (Pilar Corrias, 2025), in which the artist first brought together two distinct strands of her practice: figurative and abstract painting.
The central work, The Melancholy of the Wind, references Édouard Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe depicting a park scene that unfolds through layers of vibrant, dynamic brushwork. Shifting fields of texture and colour generate a sense of movement and atmosphere, while reclining figures emerge and recede, hovering between foreground and background as though carved from the paint itself, at times sculptural and at others dissolving into the surrounding colour. Gardens and motifs drawn from nature feature heavily throughout Moritz’s practice. Drawing in part on the Romanticist concept of nature, she frequently refers to literary and poetry in which nature is represented as a dynamic organism without static form. The titles of several works—Spring, Puck's Breakfast and Sweet little Garden of Paradise—point to this as a throughline throughout the presentation.
Notable among the presentation are three still lifes depicting skulls: figurative works that while remaining decipherable, begin to veer into abstraction. The inclusion of skulls, a recurring motif in Moritz’s practice, serves as a meditation on impermanence, mortality and the passing of time. In two of the works, Moritz includes lemons, rendered in vivid yellow, offering moments of brightness and vitality.
