Lobeda-Ost 1981

Sabine Moritz (1969) is an artist living and working in Cologne, Germany. She grew up in the former German Democratic Republic, living in the Neulobeda district of Lobeda in the suburbs of Jena – a densely populated district devised in the mid 1960s that is characterised by highrise concrete buildings and modernist urban planning. This environment had a profound effect on the young Moritz, which would later manifest itself in her work.

Having emigrated in the mid 1980s to West Germany, in 1989 she accepted a place at the Offenbach University of Art and Design, where she began drawing her childhood memories of Lobeda. In 1991 she switched from Offenbach to the Düsseldorf Art Academy where she studied first with Markus Lüpertz and then with Gerhard Richter. In moving class, she became the last pupil to sign up with Richter as he prepared to relinquish his formal teaching commitments. Moritz continued to make drawings of Lobeda during her time in Richter’s classes, and the body of work – comprising over one hundred pencil drawings – was complete towards the end of 1994.