The Sleep of Tomorrow presents new paintings and works on paper by Sabine Moritz, tracing an experimental shift in her practice. The exhibition brings together two strands of her work–abstraction and figuration–that she had previously kept apart. Large-scale canvases dominate the presentation; some purely abstract, others in which figures surface within fields of colour and light.
Moritz has pursued abstraction and figuration in parallel for years. Her abstract paintings unfold through layers of luminous, dynamic brushwork, where shifting fields of texture and colour generate a sense of movement and atmosphere. They are not simply non-representational but charged with memory, evoking landscapes, sensations, or fragments of experience without coming into focus. These works form the painterly ground into which her more recent figures begin to appear.
Moritz has developed female figures placed in settings that hover between foreground and background. Up until this body of work, she had kept abstraction and figuration strictly separate. Recently Moritz has started experimenting with paintings in which figures and abstraction intersect. A shift into figuration is coming back into Moritz’s practice; female figures emerge out of these new paintings referencing classical painting and her own womanhood. She balances these two different ways of thinking; shifting and switching mindsets between the two contrasting states of being whilst painting. In these new works, the figures emerge tentatively from the surface–as if carved from the paint itself–sometimes sculptural, sometimes dissolving into surrounding colour.
